


The Charm of the Defeated

by LittleRedCosette



Series: Resplendence [8]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Drug Abuse, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Graphic Description, Heavy Angst, Hope, Hurt/Comfort, Love, M/M, Past Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rape Recovery, Secrets, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Swearing, Victim Blaming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2018-04-23
Packaged: 2019-03-20 19:15:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 36,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13724229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedCosette/pseuds/LittleRedCosette
Summary: Existing in such close proximity for days, Arthur is increasingly glad they had such little contact during the Fischer Job, because he didn’t just forget how miserable he’s been. He forgot how much he wants this man, in this selfish, desperate way.And he’s so goddamn used to Eames wanting him, too, he’s only now starting to worry that maybe he doesn’t anymore. Maybe this is it.Maybe Arthur should resign himself to long hot showers and the punishing clench of his right fist to get him through waking up to the sight of untouchable skin and unkissable lips and untuggable hair every day.





	1. PART ONE

**Author's Note:**

> Hey there people! So, a little important note first. 
> 
> If you've read any of my Inception stories before, you'll be aware I'm basically incapable of writing a linear story. This is my vague attempt at one, but even so, there's a bit of splashing around timeline-wise. 
> 
> For series context, this takes place directly after the events of the second Resplendence story, All Things Are Moved. Honestly, I have no idea whether you should read that one first, or in fact the whole series first. I don't really know anything anymore.
> 
> The events in this story are referenced a couple of times elsewhere but never so explicitly. Please CHECK THE TAGS, folks, I don't really do happy stories. I am being very serious about this. There are multiple trigger risks in this story.
> 
> That said, I hope at least one or two of you like it. Let me know! The truth is, I could keep writing this series forever. I love you all infinitely.
> 
> LRCx

.

.

Once, a lifetime of dreams ago, after the boat trip to Igoumenitsa, before Mal died, Eames sold Arthur out to the Russian Mafia.

.

.

It happens like this. Exactly like this.

.

.

It’s a perishingly cold day in May.

Arthur is in Vienna doing clean up on a job barely shy of  _too easy_ when his phone rings, a muffled trill from inside his coat while he packs his suitcase.

It’s Eames, of course, calling under the pretence of asking for advice about hotels in Newfoundland.

Just as Arthur bids him an impatient goodbye after six minutes of adamantly insisting he has never been to Newfoundland, Eames casually adds in a breezy voice,

_Oh, Yslovski’s out for your blood, by the way. I think he’s sent a couple of men after you._

.

.

After he’s dealt with Yslovski’s goons, settled his score with the man himself and recovered his sleep in a hotel in Copenhagen, Arthur calls Eames back.

_“This is an emergency only-”_

“A little extra warning would have been nice,” Arthur spits.

 _“Oh, Arthur!”_ Eames cries, sounding like a child at a surprise birthday party.  _“You’re alive! I knew you’d be ok.”_

“Why on earth-”

 _“I transferred your half of the earnings to your New Jersey account,”_ Eames interrupts, sounding positively smug about it.

Arthur, lying beneath two sets of covers with as many pillows as the hotel clerk would allow him to request, blinks, momentarily astounded.

(Not least of all because he didn't realise Eames knew about the New Jersey account, didn't realise  _anybody_ knew about the New Jersey account.)

“My what?” he asks.

Eames makes a  _psshh_ sound through his teeth that he knows Arthur dislikes intensely.

 _“Your half,”_ he says.  _“They had a very attractive price on your head, you know.”_

Arthur, buried in a grave of goose feathers and two days beyond ripely in need of a shower, gives himself one long moment to let it sink in, breathing slowly through his nose.

“You sold me out,” he says, finally.

 _“Well of course I did, darling,”_ Eames splutters, sounding milky-tea offended.  _“I heard about it through Bolshevik Brendan.”_

Arthur refuses to outright smile. His stomach twists anxiously about a foot lower inside his body than it should be.

“Does he know you still call him that?”

That sound again, like a wave over pebbles.  _Psshh._

_“My point is, Arthur, if Bolshy knew about it, then you can bet your giddy aunt his mates in Bucharest did, too. So, I thought, well, they’ll definitely sell you out because they hate you even more than they do the Russians. I may as well get it over with before they do, top up our piggy banks a bit, I’ll have a shoe-in with Yslovski and you’ll-”_

“Get tortured in a Russian prison?” Arthur cuts in dryly, sinking deeper into his bed, swallowed up by sweaty heat.

 _“Did they really torture you?”_ Eames asks.

(He has the outrageous audacity to sound disbelieving about it, too.)

Arthur grinds his teeth together.

“Well they weren’t very polite, and that food is a crime against the Geneva Convention,” he snarls.

Eames only chuckles, sounding relieved.

_“No harm done, then. And hey! You’re an eighth of a million euros richer. I simply must know, dear, what did you do that was so bad it merited Yslovski forking out a quarter of a million to get his hands on you?”_

There are a lot of things Arthur will admit to over the phone that he probably shouldn’t, but this isn’t one of them.

Certainly not to Eames.

“I think I deserve at least two thirds,” he replies instead. “For damages and the inconvenience.”

Eames laughs even louder at this.

 _“I’ll buy you dinner in Sao Paulo,”_ he promises.

“Why Sao Paulo?”

_Psshh._

_“Because I have a job there and they might be happy without a Point Man, but I’m not.”_

Arthur stretches out across his king size bed, refrains from groaning as several joints click through his skeleton.

“Eames, I just escaped from a very angry Russian mobster. I am  _not_ working a job with you right now.”

_Psshh._

_“Well obviously not right this second,”_ Eames scoffs.

Arthur scowls. He rolls onto his stomach with some difficulty, encumbered by his sixteen pillows.

“When?” he asks.

_“Friday.”_

Arthur ends the call so quickly, he almost breaks his phone.

.

.

He doesn’t answer when Eames calls back.

.

.

(He’s too busy booking a flight to Sao Paulo.)

.

.

(Just to punch Eames in the teeth, he reassures himself.)

.

.

_(He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.)_

.

.

Three years later, when Eames goes off the radar in the aftermath of their foolhardy foray into Robert Fischer’s mind, when Arthur tracks him down to a puddle of tequila in Thailand, Arthur realises something very important.

There wasn’t a quarter of a million price on his head at all.

He wants to tell Eames he’s figured it out. The truth, the uncanny reality of that bizarre phone call and the job in Sao Paulo and the jaguar that Arthur barely got a glimpse of.

But it’s too late by then, really, because Eames possibly doesn’t feel the same anymore.

.

.

 _(I loved you,_ he murmured through sandy teeth.)

.

.

So, Arthur waits instead. He flies to Bangkok and prepares to wait for as long as it takes.

.

.

It happens like this. Exactly like this.

.

.

A spectre sits in their midst.

Malevolent, hungry, it feeds on their silences with venomous teeth, slowly poisoning them with every bite.

Eames looks worse than he did during the Fischer Job. His skin is smattered with the fingerprints of heavy drinking and he doesn’t hold down the fries he eats for more than an hour.

He hunches over the toilet bowl, the rattle of his heaving echoing in the splatter of undigested potato and he sleeps on the bathroom floor, having passed out as soon as the nausea lessened enough to stop twitching.

Arthur leaves him there.

The room has underfloor heating and honestly, Eames is more likely to get injured on the journey to the bed than he is lying on hard tiles. At three Arthur checks on him, runs a hand through the viscous sweat clinging to Eames’ back and face, as if he had showered in varnish.

While he waits, Arthur sets up his laptop at the table near the window. From here, through the doorway he can see the bottom half of Eames’ legs twisted at the knee on the floor. He can hear his laboured breaths.

Arthur raids the minibar of all booze, pours it neatly into the bathtub while standing over Eames’ unconscious form still covered only by a heavy white towel and washes it down the drain. Then he opens one of the cans of Sprite.

There isn’t much to do. His emails bounce easily, courtesy of multiple satellites, though it isn’t his preferred method of correspondence.

He says no to Brockley for the eighth time about a job in St. Petersburg, sends Henry Sorrell his chemist contacts in Mexico and ignores everything else.

Then he checks in on Robert Fischer.

All is quiet, still. The Empire remains self-contained, but it’s only been two months and Fischer-Morrow are brokering their new divide with surprisingly mature divorce proceedings.

Exactly as Saito predicted, Maurice Fischer’s legacy looks set to die its last death at the turn of the summer, just in time for Saito to go into dealership with Brownley-Hauer Inc.

Next Arthur checks in on Anika Stephens, the journalist he extracted from last month while decidedly not coming after Eames.

She seems fine, physically and mentally speaking. She is, however, suffering from an unfortunate incident involving a morally skew story being leaked to the press two days before her first book was due to print.

Screwing over journalists isn’t quite as satisfying as politicians, and Arthur almost feels bad for her. She’s hardly the first tabloid journo to leave her scruples at the door in search of a story.

It had been easy money, though, and after the hell of Fischer’s mental barriers collapsing in on them like that, breaking into Anika Stephens’ mind had been a  _dream._

Arthur smiles at his laptop, stores the quip away for when Eames wakes up.

He looks over at Eames’ legs.

They’ve moved, tucked together at the ankles but his shuddering breaths remain sleepy and even.

Arthur stares out through the window, scanning the sprawl of rooftops and high-rises that make up Bangkok.  Beams of sunlight split the clouds, dark orange in the waning of the afternoon.

He thinks about what Eames had said in that distrustful, wavering voice this morning.

 _I tried really hard to hate you,_ he’d said.

But also,  _I just thought you were going to find me._

.

.

 _(I would have,_ Arthur had kept to himself,  _if I’d even bothered looking, but I didn’t.)_

.

.

There is a spectre in their midst.

In Arthur’s darker moments, he believes it to be the ghost of what they once held between them, like the echoing heartbeat that lingers as it is consumed by the reaper.

But he is wrong. It is the ghost of Eames.

(When the time comes, much later, Arthur won’t appreciate the irony of his melodrama.)

Eames is alive, but he isn’t  _present_. He has disappeared into himself as wholly as he does into a forge.

Maybe that’s why Arthur chooses South America.

South America is a place of scalding memories, ones that involve illicit sex that would probably get them into worse trouble than Eames’ kleptomania. It’s the place that came before Arthur packed his bags and flew away without Eames’ permission; before Eames stood Arthur up in Turin just to spite him.

So once Eames has gone twelve hours without throwing up some more stomach lining, of which he must be seriously depleted by now, Arthur gets him to South America.

.

.

Eames has nothing on him but what’s in his pockets.

Luckily for Eames, Arthur has plenty of time on his hands to make the necessary arrangements.

Luckily for Arthur,  _Eames_ is still as vigilant with his identities as ever and accessing the accounts that match his passport  _(Thomas Swanley, born in Newcastle in 1983)_  is incredibly simple.

Arthur makes a note to query Eames’ vanity as to whether he honestly thinks he still looks younger than thirty.

Eames puts on the clothes offered to him, cheap cotton orange without any buttons and a pair of jeans so worn they are possibly older than Eames.

(His real age, not that twenties tripe.)

It’s early morning and they haven’t left the hotel room in four days. Arthur’s used to Eames’ extreme susceptibility to wanderlust and is disturbed by the man’s complacency as he shaves and showers and slips on the clothes he’s given.

They’ve been quiet together. Not exactly silent, but Eames hasn’t mentioned anything that can be considered more meaningful than  _chatter_ yet and Arthur is more than happy to follow suit.

So, they talk about Thailand and Robert Fischer and the best way to cook salmon.

They don’t talk about Cobb, or Monaco, or the scar on Eames’ neck that may as well spell out Arthur’s name for how much it sickens him.

“I need to make a stop on the way,” Eames says with rusty effort as they check out of the hotel.

Arthur raises his eyebrows, unsure if he’s pleased or suspicious.

Eames’ stare is impenetrably glacial and Arthur nods.

They depart side by side, like a job five years ago. The air is sticky and the city clings to them with both hands.

Eames walks with purpose down several streets before Arthur, trudging behind, realises he’s returning to the bar he’d looked ready to live out the month in when Arthur first got here.

Arthur frowns at his back the whole way, not quite daring to interrupt as they sneak around to the back door: dirty steel and toxic waste.

A young woman answers his knock. She offers him a coy smile as Eames mutters something under his breath that makes her blush.

She lets him in with her head bowed to the floor.

Arthur tries to follow but the door shuts behind the pair with a weighty screech of metal.

“Eames!” Arthur shouts, rapping the side of his fist on the door.

Confusion swells like the tide inside him. A horrid dread.

What is this place?

A sick feeling spills through Arthur as he recalls the young woman, her gold earrings and her lipgloss and her thin black bra straps.

Her eyeliner and her belly button piercing.

He stares at the badly painted door, frustration like food poisoning.

There’s a cat yowling nearby, men’s laughter and cars squealing.

He can smell petrol and shit and the sweet tang of pineapple.

The door opens again, wider this time to reveal a long, pitch black corridor.

Arthur flinches backwards two steps in surprise as Eames emerges.

He’s smirking, a lifeless look, less a mask, more a veil of amusement.

“Ready to go?” is all Arthur asks, not because he isn’t curious, not because he doesn’t care - certainly not because it isn’t his  _business_ \- but because he knows he won’t get an answer.

Not yet, anyway.

.

.

Eames relaxes infinitesimally as they walk back into the sunshine, as if finally being on their way is enough to lift his spirits.

He whistles at a street vendor who whistles back, birdsong, and Arthur, he relaxes, too.

.

.

_Have you ever forged me in a dream?_

For fun or for a job?

_What? Asshole! Either._

Yes.

_Which one?_

Have a guess, dear.

.

.

“Remember the Atwal Job?” Arthur asks as they lounge, first class, revelling in their legroom.

Arthur orders them two coca-colas before Eames can reply to the stewardess’ offer of champagne and they sip them in cosy discomfort.

Eames, sitting as close to reclining as he can without adjusting his seat, blinks a lazy eye roll.

“You mean the time I flew a Boeing 747?”

“In a _dream,"_  Arthur iterates, not for the first time.

“I seem to recall Martha using the phrase  _thank God we had you with us, Eames,”_  the Englishman coos in a breathy West Coast voice.

Arthur allows him a tight, pleased smile.

“Every time I’m on a plane as it takes off, I remember the look on your face when the mark passed out before we even left the runway.”

He glances at Eames to see him wearing a dark, wary expression.

Arthur feels his face heat up and his hand tightens around the can of coke.

“Every time?” Eames asks softly. Then, before Arthur can do anything more than nod, “Even when you’re about to perform inception for a mad Japanese businessman?”

The air clears; sliced through by the blade that snips Arthur’s marionette strings.

He feels relieved and disappointed. Eames either doesn’t notice or care. Maybe both.

He drains his drink, crumples it in in his hand and taps his thumbnails against the edges.

Then he closes his eyes and sleeps all the way to Istanbul.

.

.

(Flying to Cusco from Bangkok takes two days, which Arthur had thought would be fine, but it isn’t, not really, it’s awkward as  _fuck_ and it takes up more energy than  _walking_ the whole damn way would.)

.

.

The first time, their first job. Eames goes on and on and  _on_ about how he’s going to whisk off the mark in the guise of her ex-boyfriend returned yet again to woo her.

Arthur is anxious and tired and snappish.

Right before they split up at the train station, he grunts at a flippant Eames,  _Just be back before the kick._

In that second level hotel room, later, he thinks it must be a token kindness, an olive branch from mouth to ear, when Eames mutters it back at him, the closest to worried he ever gets on a job.

Then they got to LAX and Eames left without a pause and Arthur thinks maybe it was the opposite. Maybe it was supposed to be a kick in the teeth but Arthur, so starved of attention, had mistaken it for a kiss.

.

.

 _(Go to sleep, Mr Eames,_ he said, after they fucked on that goddamn boat to Greece. And again, like a promise, as Eames’ eyelids close over a mischievous stare.)

.

.

Eventually, they reach Cusco.

All of Arthur’s Spanish skills are in constant threat of being undermined by his Italian and he’s hoping that this will force Eames into proactivity.

Eames has enough patience to draw the same face for six hours every day until he gets it right, but a few broken phrases of ill-accented, badly conjugated verbs and he gets waspish.

The temperature is mild compared to the blistering terror of Bangkok. Everything smells  _green dry dust dirt wet brick water._

Eames is brighter already. Gold lion lazy as he lopes through the crackling city like he belongs, which he doesn’t, not really, not like he does in Marrakech.

Still, the city embraces him, and Arthur feels the usual glug of envy at the way Eames moulds himself to a new environment.

Arthur works hard at his own idiosyncrasies, maintains them nicely like horticulture.

He designed every piece of himself, the same as Eames.

The only difference is, he’s only done it once and he’s not entirely sure he has the energy to ever do it again.

“I smell poker,” Eames says as they step out of their cab onto the corner of a chattering, swollen plaza.

Arthur twists his lips.

“No, you don’t,” he retorts and receives only a single raised eyebrow from Eames in return. “Can we at least check into a hotel?”

Eames waves his hand airily over his shoulder.

“Details,” he scoffs. “I have a friend who can help.”

Arthur smiles painfully.

That disappointed relief is back, bullying his shoulders into a stoop as he carries his suitcase with heavy arms.

“Of course you do,” he mutters.

.

.

The first surprise comes when Eames orders orange juice at a bar that night.

He’s visibly itching for more, ankles jittering but his eyes are calm, cloudy.

Arthur has a lemonade, and then another, until soon it’s gone one in the morning and he’s telling Eames all about the elevator kick, how zero gravity is even worse than it sounds, how unfair it is that nobody is going to believe him.

“It can go into your mythology,” Eames teases, elbow on the table and chin in his hand.

Arthur narrows his eyes.

“What do you mean?”

Eames laughs, delighted, and runs his fingers through the crown of his dark gold hair. It spikes up under his fingers, bristly with sweat.

“The great  _Arthur_ mystique,” Eames drawls. “Oh, come on, Arthur. The one where you’re the godson of Naples’ favourite hitman? The one about you drowning a man in the shower for screwing up the carpet of a dream?”

The back of Arthur’s neck prickles at the sly look Eames gives him.

The bar is loud, card game and José loud, but Eames looks at him like they’re alone in outer space.

“You don’t believe those, though, do you?” he asks.

Eames scoffs.

“Arthur, you couldn’t kill a man in reality.”

He says it with such absolute certainty, such undeniable softness, that Arthur is speechless.  _Offended._

“What does that mean?” he snaps, but Eames just grins wider.

He orders another orange juice with a lazy flick of Spanish.

“It’s alright, you know,” he says.

“I’ve killed people topside,” Arthur says hotly, several decibels too loud to say he’s in  _public._

Eames raises his eyebrows even higher and Arthur blushes scarlet, glancing around but nobody’s heard, nobody cares.

“Yes,” Eames says quietly, leaning very close, smelling of sweat and oranges. “Bad people, in action, when it’s life or death. Me or you.”

“And?” Arthur demands but he knows, he understands.

The pitying, arch expression on Eames’ face cuts him deep.

Arthur, snap turtle shy, resentful.

“I killed the men Yslovski sent after me.”

Behind them somewhere, a soccer match kicks off on the television set and there’s a series of wild cheers, smashing glass. Foul tempers and pride.

Eames is still close enough for Arthur to count his eyelashes.

“I’m sure you did,” he says in a vile,  _kind_ tone.

“And there were those thugs Goston hired to-” Arthur begins without really meaning to.

He doesn’t know why he’s arguing, he doesn’t  _want_ to argue, certainly not about this. This is the last thing he should be talking about it.

He’s pretty glad that Eames interrupts, even if it’s to reiterate with parental condescension,

“It’s not the same, Arthur.”

Yslovski’s men had caught up with him before he could leave Austria. Their bodies were heavy, and Arthur’s fingertips shook at the sight of the wedding ring on one of their hands.

“I know,” he says, coughs dryly and sips his lemonade. Then, because he’s such a damned masochist, “Do you really think I couldn’t?”

Eames, impassive, his skin a ruddy tan of scruff, leans away from Arthur, taking with him the smell of sweat and oranges, the warmth of his closeness.

“I hope you never find out,” he says coolly.

Then he turns away to watch the soccer.

.

.

In Marrakech, in the loneliest crowd, there’s the man that calls Eames  _Skin al’iinjilizia._

 _What does that mean?_ he asks Eames, who speaks Arabic like he drinks whisky, reads it like he eats steak.

And Eames, his mouth moves around a lie first, then, dry as a confessional’s echo,

_It means the English Knife._

.

.

The valley that stretches out before them, ravaged and sun-kissed, extends into a deep, lush horizon.

From the crest of the hill, it feels very much as if they might leap into the air so far that their feet would never touch the earth below.

 _Sacsayhuamán,_  the Incan treasure. Stones smoothed by wind and feet. They walk through the dry path that encircles the citadel on the outskirts of Cusco.

Rain spits through the sunshine, cuts through the air so fine it stings their golden faces.

Eames walks behind, a little out of breath.

Arthur doesn’t comment on it. They’ve walked up this sloping trek six times, now, and at some point, Eames won’t sweat so much anymore. Won’t lag behind on unsteady feet.

Already his speed has improved since the first time, as has his mood.

“The problem is,” he puffs. “Not many large cats up here.”

Arthur rolls his eyes before turning around.

Eames’ face is shiny and pink, his hair ruffled from obsessive fingertips.

He has his hands on his knees, his curved back dark with sweat and his tattoos snake out from beneath his green polo shirt. A purple fishtail bleeds down his left tricep and Arthur stalls his glance, not recognising it.

“The problem is, we didn’t bring water this time,” Arthur says.

Eames lets out a despairing jackal wail, a deep dry  _Haaa_ as he bows his head between his knees.

“Fuck this,” he snarls at his badly worn trainers.

The back of his neck is dusty and bronze.

“I think I saw people doing tai chi in the square, last time,” Arthur continues, brushing his hair out of his face. He’s forgone the pomade, no point when he’ll just sweat it out and grease his scalp.

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and rocks a little on his feet.

Eames’ head snaps up at him, his face dark with impotent threat.

“I am  _not_ doing tai chi,” he grunts, sounding more like Arthur had suggested he take a bath in a pit of fire ants. He groans as he returns to standing upright, stretching backwards in compensation.

Arthur laughs.

“We could jog,” he suggests instead.

“Are you trying to kill me?” Eames gasps, his eyes going wide which, complete with the frayed static of his hair, only adds to his electrified badger imitation.

“Well,” Arthur shrugs solemnly as he pulls one foot up towards his lower back in a gentle stretch that tugs his quads. “If you’re too tired…”

“Don’t think you can bait me into exercise,” Eames says, but his eyes shift uncomfortably to the path ahead.

The orange juice diet had lasted precisely twenty hours before it turned into a screwdriver.

Arthur’s not sure if Eames thinks Arthur’s completely stupid or just doesn’t care if he knows what he’s up to.

(Either option stings a little, like those high air specks of rain.)

Whatever the case may be, the sweat on Eames’ face isn’t clean and the churning of his belly - if his stooped gait is anything to go by - is not to be trusted.

“I’m just saying,” Arthur continues in a light, sing song tone. “If you want to - hey!”

The heavy shape of Eames barrels past, jackal howl laughter and arms tucked tight.

His liver might be pickled and his head might be full of ants, but the fucker’s still fast on his feet.

Arthur takes off after him, follows the little puffs of dirt sprayed by his feet behind him.

“You’re a dirty cheat!” Arthur shouts, running at half speed.

Eames turns to jog backwards. He’s still a decent twenty metres away, bouncing the balls of his feet lightly, his face creased with laughter.

“You’re letting me win, you twat,” he says, which is completely true, of course.

Arthur speeds up as Eames turns around to run forwards, cuts left into the myriad of flat stones on light feet. Arthur leisurely takes in his frame.

He’s not as bulky as he was in Paris, but then, he’d been in Kenya for God knows how long before the Fischer Job. He’s always heavier when he’s in Africa. He eats better and he fights more and he’s happier for it.

Arthur follows at an easy pace, muscles warm as he keeps a comfortable, ever decreasing distance from Eames’ back, slowing ahead to a jog.

He wonders to himself when exactly he started accumulating this knowledge. Wonders at what point he started collecting the useless pieces of Eames, the way he used to collect other meaningless things, like favourite prime numbers and cities that sit on confluence rivers.

He catches Eames after a few minutes, when Eames’ feet start to hit the ground heavier and his breath gets loud enough to hear from behind.

“Can’t believe you forgot the water,” Eames pants as together their jogging stutters to a halt. Ahead, a trio of young men wearing backpacks and sunhats, trails of Portuguese left behind in the air like crickets.

 _“Me? ”_ Arthur snorts.

“Well  _I_ was never going to remember,” Eames retorts honestly.

Arthur nods, disgruntled, which feels unreasonable because he knew Eames wouldn’t remember.

As Eames catches his breath, Arthur stares across the dark bouldered walls. They're embedded so firmly into each other it seems quite possible they grew there themselves, like an orchard of dry stone.

They’re deep enough below the equatorial groove that, despite August’s tight grip, the sun is less punishing, here.

Cusco is one of the cities Arthur memorised in his list of confluence river cities and maybe that’s why he chose here.

It’s familiar, even at first glance, without ever being here before. Like Narnia, or Neverland.

 _(Didn’t know you were such an Anglophile,_ he can hear Eames tease if he were to dare say such a thing aloud.)

When he comes back to himself, he realises Eames is looking at him.

This isn’t new. Eames has been looking at Arthur for years and rarely with any particular subtlety.

He looks at Arthur the way he looks at everything. Like he’s a game to be played or a piece of art to be forged.

Arthur knows Eames looks at him and sees a challenge, that Eames sees a challenge in  _everything._

This isn’t that kind of look, though.

Eames is staring at him with something close to contentment, as if he is surprised to find himself here, but glad of it all the same.

There’s sweat trickling down his face and his brow is smooth without its customary half crease, that wrinkle that’s always there, like he can never decide between frowning or laughing.

Eames is looking at him and Arthur, he looks back.

The sunshine is weak, casting yellow shadows and cooling the heavy green surrounding the ancient city’s dark structure. Despite the quiet hum of chatter close by, that trickling, youthful Portuguese, they are isolated here, at peace with one another.

The past two years, they’ve been so  _awful,_  and Arthur is hit in the chest with his own surprise, as if someone has dropped a cartoon anvil into his ribcage.

He’s been miserable, he remembers quite suddenly. He’s been living with a despairing wraith of unspoken, unfulfilled need ever since Mal died.

And he isn’t anymore. He’s free.

He’s free of his obligation to Dom, the one he made up in his head. And Eames, he’s free of the crushing burden of carrying the memories of the Walker-Stoneley Job alone.

Arthur only realises he’s smiling when Eames smiles back. Straw strands of hair curl over his forehead and his scruff is already very close to becoming a beard.

It isn’t a happy smile, not really. But like the mist in Eames’ cloudy eyes, it’s a peaceful look, a  _content_ look.

“Were they  _really_ doing tai chi?” Eames asks before the stretch of silence can grow uncomfortable.

Arthur shrugs one shoulder.

“Pretty sure it was tai chi,” he replies. “Didn’t look much like pilates.”

There’s a glitter of glee in Eames’ eyes, but he’s not quite there yet, not quite ready to start teasing Arthur about his  _pilates_ knowledge.

He sniffs instead, rubs his forehead with his hand and grimaces when it comes away wet.

For a moment Arthur is disappointed. He wants Eames to tease him about being too bendy and ask him how many  _positions_ he can do.

It’s selfish, he knows, and that dampens his flare of frustration considerably.

There’s salt on Eames’ neck and unfamiliar tattoos on his arms and Arthur wants to taste it all, but he won’t. He can't.

Existing in such close proximity for days, Arthur is increasingly glad they had such little contact during the Fischer Job, because he didn’t just forget how miserable he’s been. He forgot how much he  _wants_ this man, in this selfish, desperate way.

And he’s so goddamn used to Eames wanting him, too, he’s only now starting to worry that maybe he doesn’t anymore. Maybe this is it.

Maybe Arthur should resign himself to long hot showers and the punishing clench of his right fist to get him through waking up to the sight of untouchable skin and unkissable lips and untuggable hair every day.

Then Eames heaves a great, long suffering sigh.

“Alright,” he says, sounding resigned, and something hot that feels like hopeful victory bursts in Arthur’s chest, filling the gap where blood was before it rushed south to the cock. It seizes him with want, but Eames, a little laugh falls out of him. “If we jog, though,  _I’m_ picking dinner tonight.”

Embarrassment and a vicious, self-loathing prickle Arthur’s cheeks as he crash-lands out of his stirring thoughts.

“Fair enough,” he manages to choke out.

Eames glances out of the corner of his eye, suspicious, and for a moment Arthur fears Eames knows where his thoughts were.

(Where they _are,_ a snide voice in his head corrects.)

“Come on, then,” Eames says, rolling his head until his neck clicks, then his shoulders. “I’ll follow.”

It doesn’t mean anything, but it’s too true. It scalds Arthur’s guilty conscience.

Because maybe the first time they met, it was Arthur tailing Eames around London, but Eames has followed Arthur ever since.

Not always happily, of course, and not all the time, and Arthur has followed Eames plenty, too. They’ve tangoed this viper and mongoose for years.

Still, Eames always ends up where Arthur needs him.

Arthur doesn’t say that, though. Doesn’t say anything.

He just takes off through the wide, open paths of the ancient Peruvian citadel, where there is more sky than land. Behind him, the soft pad of echo steps, his shadow runner, breathing deep and loud.

Arthur doesn’t turn back to make sure Eames is following.

.

.

(He doesn’t need to.)

.

.

On a Thursday in the early years, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, they help the Cobbs run a series of tests on a new compound.

Arthur thinks it’s pointless trying to tailor lucid dreaming to psychiatry, thinks it will encourage the Freud disciples to think they can label dreams like colours.

Eames thinks it’s  _cute._

He says as much to Mal as they squabble in sharp jabs of French over a tub of strawberry ice cream.

They’re in Paris, in a house that is probably Mal’s parents’ home, but Arthur tries very hard to not pry too much. His gaze slides blindly over the photos on the walls for fear of seeing something that makes his heart swell too much.

“We could cure diseases of the mind,” Mal squawks, snatching the spoon out of Eames’ mouth so fast it smacks loudly against his teeth. He lets out a gasp and brings a hand to his lips, looking upset.

“Going inside a schizophrenic’s mind isn’t the answer, Mallorie,” he says behind his hand. He’s the only person Arthur knows who calls her that all the time. “It’s a recipe for disaster. But if you think you can cure PTSD by going inside a person’s mind and somehow erasing their boo-boos, then maybe incepting the words  _calm down_ into their skull, I am happy to help.”

Mal rises to the bait, of course, just like she always does.

Arthur quietly takes the half empty ice cream tub from the kitchen table between them.

Finds a spoon of his own and finishes it himself.

.

.

A very small part of Arthur, the silly part, the part that blinded the rest of him to Dom’s growing state of madness in the lead up to the stupidest and most brilliant job of his career, wishes they had found something useful in those dreams.

He wishes he could go inside Eames’ mind and bandage up the wounds, stitch  _calm down_ over every scar until he forgets.

They’re staying in a flat owned by a pre-dreamshare friend of Eames’. A friend who calls him  _Jack_ and makes jokes about diamonds that Arthur doesn’t understand.

The flat is tiny but neat. It smells of perfume that leaks in through the windows, although from where, Arthur can’t quite figure out. Arthur knows Eames doesn’t like the smallness of it, that keeping the windows open all the time is his way to remind himself he isn’t trapped.

But then one morning, after a week or so of wandering through Incan ruins and frequenting bars full of soccer fans, Arthur leaves his watch in the bathroom.

It seems innocent enough to sneak in and get it.

There’s very little privacy between them anymore, even if their foundations are closer to sand than cement these days.

The shower’s on, Arthur can hear it, and while there’s not much room to move, there’s a decent shower curtain that Eames can close if he’s feeling modest.

So, cautiously, Arthur turns the lever to push open the door.

It jams. Locked.

Frozen, Arthur lets go. His heart gives an extra little jump between beats that at first, he doesn’t understand. He stares at the white door, flimsy enough, but  _locked._

He can’t remember the last time he locked the bathroom door when he was alone with Eames. Maybe he never did, because the first time they were alone in a hotel room, well, privacy was a thing of the past.

Breath held in his chest, Arthur turns back to look down the musty hall.

His own bedroom door is open, he can see the corner of the bed, the light spilling out.

Beside it, Eames’ door is shut.

Arthur swallows, tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. He hasn’t been in Eames’ room since the first day, when they bought some new clothes for him and he wanted to make sure they made it to the hangers in the wardrobe.

Tentatively, ignoring the jarring wrongness of his actions, he opens the door.

The bed is nicely made, hospital corners and plumped pillows. The windows are open, allowing a cool, perfumed draft. A book sits on the bedside table and some clothes lie waiting on the bed.

There’s nothing out of place, nothing to justify Arthur’s hummingbird heart.

Still, he turns back quickly. Hurries to the bathroom door and pushes harder this time, very hard. It doesn’t budge, barely rattles.

“Eames!” he calls out, slaps the door with his open palm three times. “Eames, are you in there?”

The splashing water inside the bathroom stops. Arthur feels his stomach coil.

It’s a few seconds, enough for shame to flood Arthur like an injection of laudanum. The lock unclicks, and the door swings open to reveal a bewildered Eames, bubbles of shampoo in his hair, clutching a towel around himself.

His skin is lobster pink from the hot water and his eyes are red as they flick behind Arthur down the hall.

He must see that his bedroom door isn’t shut anymore, because when he looks back at Arthur’s face, he’s furious.

“Where the fuck else would I be?” he snarls.

The bathroom door slams shut, the lock clicks back.

Arthur can feel himself shaking. The sockets of his shoulders feel loose and he’s still standing, nose to the door, when he hears the shower start up again.

Adrenaline bites at the frayed edges of his anxiety.

He stays there, trembling, until the shower turns back off.

.

.

 _Shower? Then we’ll talk?_ Eames had asked on that first morning in Bangkok.

And Arthur, maybe he  _is_ an idiot, because he honestly thought that would be the end of their troubles.

.

.

And Eames, he visibly tries, and it's ugly, shameful. It makes Arthur feel embarrassed, the way he did when his father cried too loudly at his mum's funeral.

Eames tries, with little gestures that don't quite make it all the way. That brush of fingertips that ghosts over Arthur, that should warm him from the inside out, but instead they leave him cold.

.

.

Arthur is  _Arthur._  He fixes things. He researches and he works and gets it done.

Not this, though.

.

.

_(Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.)_

.

.

Things do, in fact, get better.

Eames gives him a healthy dose of silent treatment for his mistrust, followed by a long night of drinking bottle after bottle of Cristal beer and playing poker against a group of locals and a few tourists.

Arthur joins in stubbornly, even though he doesn’t like it, not any of it. He understands that he is doing penance, that Eames feels betrayed by Arthur’s intrusiveness and as a result, he’s being further locked out for a little longer.

It doesn’t last.

(They never last, Eames’ moods. He's as constant as the moon.)

The next day, Eames puts his trainers on and suggests Sacsayhuamán. Even jokes about doing some tai chi.

He’s brighter today, gentler. The thorns in his tone are less prominent and Arthur thinks,  _finally._

He also thinks,  _really?_

It feels too good to be true, too easy that Eames should shrug off Arthur’s nosy coddling.

Then again, Arthur once sabotaged Eames’ chance of working on a Dalí heist just because he needed Eames’ help on a job of his own, and Eames didn’t complain once.

He’s supposes it’s possible, just possible, that something is being mended.

.

.

(In three years’ time, Arthur will come back here. He’ll visit a man with a scar on his right cheek and half of his right ear missing. He’ll say in broken, uncomfortable Spanish,  _I’m so sorry for what I did. It wasn’t right. I hope you understand.)_

.

.

Eames wakes up late every morning.

Arthur’s getting good at judging his sleep schedule because soon there’s coffee still hot every time Eames staggers out of bed, sleep grumpy and playful.

Arthur likes routines. Simple ones, nothing too difficult to maintain. 

He always liked  _their_ routines before. The ones with rules, like no sex during a job, unless it lasts more than three weeks, in which case surveillance car blowjobs are acceptable. 

Or the tea and coffee swapping game, which Eames always wins because Arthur has the strategy, but Eames' sleight of hand is as practiced as his ability to breathe.

So, they fall into other easy routines. New ones. Ones that don't require negotiation.

They explore Cusco lazily and they bicker gently and Eames rolls his eyes laboriously at Arthur’s Spanish.

“Are you doing this on purpose?” he asks one day as they leave a shop with bags full of groceries and Arthur blushes a little.

Eames’ stare sparkles with pitiful, daring fondness.

He doesn’t push for an answer.

Instead, he bullies Arthur into cooking dinner while he perches on a chair in the kitchen like a bird at a nest, doodling in a sketchpad.

Arthur eyes the image upside down, casting sidelong glances from the stove as garlic burns in the pan.

“You forgot the pearl earring,” he teases.

Eames, nose close to the paper, huffs a breath of disdain, easy clemency.

“No, I didn’t,” he mutters, half a grin and a gulp of wine.

He shades in her hair and it reminds Arthur of blonde streaks, a shock of white yellow. He's startled.

“You used Gabby on the Fischer Job,” he says without really meaning to. He blames it on the face etched out under Eames’ hand, the soft girlishness of her, like that bombshell forge that had so unexpectedly appeared in the second level.

Eames snorts, quirks one eyebrow over his pen.

“Yes, I did. She’s very useful.”

“I thought you retired her after the Winston Job.”

The cubes of chicken hiss as they splatter into the pan with the onions. Oil spits over his hand and he pulls away, cursing.

“She’s a quick fix,” Eames says dismissively.

The Winston Job is an old wound for both of them. It’s bad-batch somnacin and an extractor with a bullet in his gut and a client with a long arm and deep pockets. A mean streak the circumference of the sun.

Arthur has a small white scar on his back that Eames stitched badly the first time because he had three broken fingers and a mild concussion, and it comes from that ill-fated job.

Seeing that pretty face, those long limbs, had been a firework of surprise in Arthur’s chest. Reminded him of what a man sounds like when he’s bleeding out more slowly than he should.

Maybe he should apologise for playing Ariadne like that. Apologise to the fierce woman safely back in Paris and the ferocious man here in the kitchen with him, currently hiding behind his notebook.

He glances over his shoulder to see Eames smirking.

“Foul play, darling,” he says, confirming Arthur's suspicion that he'd been caught.

His voice is as silky as the lines of his pen sliding over the paper.

"Oh, come on.  _Dream a little bigger?”_ Arthur retorts coolly and Eames chuckles.

“You’re just so easily bruised,” he says, tender as broken blood vessels.

Arthur returns to the pan, the smile never quite leaving his lips.

“What about a feather instead?” Eames asks, tapping his portrait of the soft skinned girl, her doe eyes, her small mouth.

Arthur drops a generous handful of dried chillies into the pan.

“Pearl’s a classic,” he says.

When Eames doesn’t respond, he looks back.

Those round ocean eyes, impenetrable and warm. He nods in agreement and starts to circle a pearl into her earlobe.

.

.

There is a spectre in their midst.

It’s the ghost of something that died. Arthur mourned it, but it was a needless funeral.

It’s blooming again. This spectre isn’t a spirit, it’s a phoenix.

There’s heat and light and the fire’s too small to scorch them yet.

It’s a safe heat, a promising light. And Eames, he seems to sense it, too.

.

.

 _(Can I help you, darling?_ Eames asked the day they met; and Arthur teased him about being a public menace.)

.

.

(A better answer would have been  _Yes.)_

.

.

September creeps closer, tiptoes towards them on fluttering feet.

.

.

“What are we doing?” Eames asks after two weeks.

Arthur looks up from his book.

Eames is leaning his chair on its back legs and he refrains from kicking it into tipping over, but only just. Arthur puts down his book and stares across the cafe table, then out at the open street around them.

“I thought we were on vacation,” he says simply.

Eames narrows his eyes shrewdly, one hand on his iced tea.

“You don’t take  _vacations,”_ he says obstinately. Sneers the last word but Arthur’s fairly certain that’s at the word itself, rather than the concept entirely, or even Arthur, who purses his lips.

“Yes, I do,” he retorts. It sounds like a lie, despite the fact he  _knows_ he does. So does Eames.

Although, they’re never really taken one  _together_ as such. Never more than a day or two winding down after a tough job.

 _But I stayed in Manchester with you for a month,_ he wants to say, but he knows that doesn’t count, or at least won’t to Eames.

 _You had two broken ribs and a fractured ankle, you couldn’t do anything else,_ he’ll say in response, and he’ll be right.

“So, this is just a holiday,” Eames clarifies, interrupting the fake argument in Arthur’s head before it can escalate.

Arthur runs his thumb over the rim of his coffee cup.

Close by, a car horn blares as a cyclist starts shouting.

“Yes,” he says.

“For how long?”

“However long we like.”

Eames considers this.

He takes a few gulps of his lemon tea, probably to stall a response, crunches ice cubes in his mouth.

 _He never used to do that,_ Arthur thinks absently.

Around them, customers lilt and chat in welcome, gesturing voices. South America was a good decision, really, one of his better ones.

It occurs to Arthur only now, though, as he watches Eames scowl at his glass, that he has brought Eames here under the assumption Eames isn't ready for another job.

It seems foolish now. 

Eames has done countless jobs since Walker-Stoneley, one of them being an  _actual_   _inception._  Why wouldn't he want to work?

But Eames doesn't say anything about Arthur's sudden dictatorship over his schedule.

He just clears his throat, that crease is in brow teasing closer to a frown and says,

“You’re being very...”

He doesn’t finish.

Arthur is relieved, because the only ends to that sentence are either criticisms, which would make Arthur defensive, or compliments, which would break Arthur’s heart,

Eames is suspicious, probably rightly so. Arthur has spent so long trying to shake off Eames’ affection, only for Cobb to drag them together on that last job, the big one. Now, he’s spent more time with the man these past two and a half weeks than he has done since Mal died.

Cusco is busier than Arthur expected. Brighter, fuller.

(There are a lot of gin joints.)

Eames closes his mouth, pinched at the corners as if afraid his words might wrestle their way out of their own accord.

Arthur is acutely aware of what he’s about to say. In those few seconds of stillness, he foresees a hundred possible outcomes, each one uglier than the next.

He takes a deep breath and says, very slowly, every syllable worth its weight in gold,

“I know I didn’t exactly say it, but I missed you. A lot. I don’t want to miss you anymore. I think it’s time we stop pretending we’re not, you know. _Us._ I want to be with, you know. Just you. Nobody else.”

Eames blinks. Just once at first, then several times in rapid succession, enough that Arthur thinks it might be Morse code.

He hopes Eames understands his cowardly out, that this isn’t about jobs or extractions or inceptions or anything, anything but this.

Then Eames grimaces as he looks down at his iced tea, looks momentarily  _sad,_  which fucking  _hurts,_ it hurts Arthur’s soul, wherever he buried it, because that was not the intended response.

It’s a fleeting look.

Then a sly, cheerful expression creeps over Eames, a devilish mask. Like the look he gives when he’s wearing a particularly attractive forge, as if he forgets his own face could be devastation incarnate, if only he’d stop  _posing_ all the time.

“Well, I am quite the catch, I suppose,” he teases wryly, then waves at a pretty young waitress to hail her over.

There was a time when Eames used the sting of how attractive Arthur found him sparingly, aware of the power he wielded.

Maybe he’s forgotten, just like Arthur intended him to, because it really, really, really fucking hurts.

.

.

That night, they don’t go to a sports bar. They don’t go to a poker joint.

They go to a goddamn, sticky floor, broken condom club.

.

.

There’s wax in his hair, which should have been a big clue. His very presence  _zings_ with energy.

Eames is  _nervous._ Arthur watches it play out through his body like a symphony.

It starts with a thumb tapping and very calm eyes.

Eames’ poker face has always been stellar. It’s his thumbs that give him away, heavy, forceful jitters that are sometimes enough to make Arthur shift his pants.

“Are you kidding me?” he asks as he realises that they’re approaching the gaudy, neon monstrosity down the road, a swarm of thickset bouncers and skimpy girls and boys.

Eames wets his lower lip with a slow tongue.

“Oh, don’t be a bore,” he quips, voice reedy enough that it doesn’t quite cut.

Arthur scowls, fiddling with the buttons of his shirt, rolled up at the sleeves and too thick for the dense night air.

There’s a thunderstorm approaching.

Eames leads the way, peacock proud. He chats with two women in the small queue to get in.

The girls flash and glow with their jewellery, more skin than clothes. They melt in Eames’ sunny attention, don’t realise how fake it all is. Don’t realise that laugh Eames does is as beautifully crafted a lie as the name he gives them when they ask.

Arthur tries to make eye contact, but Eames isn’t looking at him and before Arthur can voice any further protest, they’re inside.

.

.

 _(Are you happy?_ he’ll ask later, much later. Not because he doesn’t know the answer, but because he wants to hear the words that cover the truth, silk curtains of pretend.)

.

.

The music pulses through the air, smelling of lemonade and whisky. Arthur thinks about the Nickton Job, that dream that was full of all this mating ground trash.

He didn’t like it when he was twenty.

He detests it at thirty.

It makes his bones feel too big for his body, makes his spinal cord frost over and he moves stiffly through the rippling crowd with as much difficulty as Eames snakes through it easily.

Pink and white lights stripe the dance floor and the bodies that crush together could be fighting or fucking, Arthur’s not sure he’d be able to tell the difference. His eyes are on the back of Eames’ head, on the blades of his shoulders cutting through his thin white shirt.

Arthur follows at a jostled, impatient pace. As he reaches the long, low bar peppered with glasses and busy with bartenders, Arthur hears Eames order two vodka tonics, which can only be on purpose because he knows how much Arthur dislikes them.

He’s prickling, already damp at the armpits and lower back. He doesn’t like this dark room with the bright strobe and the pretty people. He’s not sure why he’s here, not sure why  _Eames_ is here, given the way he he’s been so averse to crowds during daylight hours.

Beside him, a girl stares unabashed at him. They are precisely the same height, and the unconscious onceover he gives her reveals she’s wearing a pair of astonishingly high heels that make him feel dizzy to look at.

Her petite yellow dress is painted over her lithe frame and her hair is black, plaited tightly to her head.

“Bailarias conmigo?” she asks very loudly.

She holds one hand out, palm to the ceiling.

Arthur stalls. An elbow nudges his back.

Even as he turns, Eames is pressing a glass into his hand and winking.

“A él le encantaría,” he tells the girl, pushing Arthur towards the sea of writhing bodies.

And Arthur, glass in his hand, allows himself to be pulled into swarm by the eyelash heavy, lip biting girl whom he hopes desperately is at least not a teenager.

He feels Eames’ eyes on him, but when he glances over the girl’s bony shoulder, he’s turned away.

.

.

_I’ve been told you’re very good._

At drugging people?

_At forging._

Apparently.

.

.

(When this comes back to haunt Arthur, it isn’t the way he thought it would.)

.

.

The vodka slides down easier soon enough. Maybe it’s her hips or his eyes or just Arthur’s natural submission to eighty decibel walls of noise.

All he knows is, he’s been playing this game for at least two hours, has burned his way through three women and twice as many drinks and he’s ready to leave, because Eames has had the same woman pressed against his front like she’s trying to melt into his skin for the past half an hour.

He’s powered through more drinks than Arthur, naturally. Even spent two songs tucked neatly right into all the creases of Arthur’s back, his mouth close enough to taste the sweat on the back of Arthur’s neck, close enough to make Arthur’s body clench tight.

Now they’re separated by four vibrating bodies so battered by the music it’s wouldn’t be surprising to find they died ten minutes ago, are floating only on the volume of the beat that thuds through the floor, ripples like a Jurassic Park special.

Arthur extracts himself from a pair of arms he doesn’t remember taking hold of his waist.

His head is heavy and his mouth is sore and his hands paw distractedly at each dancer as he brushes past them.

Eames responds to his hand on his shoulder with a twitch of limbs.

When Arthur continues, insistent, he looks up, eyebrows raised.

A word that is probably Arthur’s name comes out of his mouth. The lights strip across his face like thin lined bruises flashing over his dazed expression.

Arthur jerks his head towards the exit and Eames pouts, reluctant.

“Eames, now!” he shouts, though he doubts it’ll be heard over the din.

The woman wrapped around the trunk of Eames’ torso reaches up to push Arthur’s hand away.

When that doesn’t work, she tries to pull him between them instead. Eames seems slightly more receptive to this idea, his eyes dark with alcohol and hair plastered to his forehead, but Arthur holds firm.

“Come on!” he shouts, taking Eames’ wrists and pulling.

Eames is more malleable when the woman gives them up as a lost cause. He allows himself to be pulled through the crowd. Arthur can feel his feet dragging, but before he can start actually screaming, the door is in sight.

The bouncers seem taller than they did upon entry, sterner and older, or maybe not. Arthur feels a hiccup of vodka burst at his Adam’s apple and he swallows it down.

The night air is barely any cooler than inside. Darkness swallows them, and the thunderstorm hasn’t hit yet but it’s ready, hanging over them in the air above. There are no stars to be seen.

“Ugh,  _bore_ ,” Eames cries aimlessly into the sky. Despite this, Arthur only needs to tug lightly at one wrist now and he comes willingly enough.

The streets aren’t full, but they aren’t empty, either. Arthur’s lost track of the days of the week, but there’s more people out than he’s seen in a while. A couple stretch starfish out across a wall, the sounds of them wet and strong and Arthur hurries past.

“Where are we going?” Eames asks, doesn’t seem to expect an answer because he just throws more questions out into the ether as they trot at Arthur’s powerful speed down the street. “What’s wrong? What do you want? Why did we leave? Why did you leave? Why did I leave? Where are we? What’s going on?”

Arthur can’t pinpoint the feeling sitting quietly in the base of his throat. It could just be the awaiting hangover. It could be anxiety or anger or fear.

It could be some hybrid of emotion that is yet undiscovered.

Then Eames wrenches his wrist out of Arthur’s grip, bringing them to a halt and when Arthur looks back at that red mouth and those dozy eyes and the shirt with a button missing, he realises what it is.

He’s jealous.

It’s not a new feeling, he’s never been immune to it but this, right here, feels different. He’s jealous and he’s envious and he feel strangely betrayed by his own body for squirming under Eames’ belligerent stare.

“What’s gotten into you?” Eames asks, so innocently, so bewildered, it tips Arthur right over the edge into the pit of his anger.

Pointing a hard index finger at Eames’ chest, he shouts,

“You were going to fuck her!”

Eames’ eyebrows rise, surprised and a little amused, and Arthur feels hot slick shame, knows how ridiculous it is to think that because he’s not entirely sure Eames has ever fucked a woman in his life.

He clenches his jaw and Eames laughs, actually  _laughs,_ just a short little triplet of breaths that make known how utterly stupid he thinks Arthur is.

“No, I wasn’t,” he says.

“Oh, you’re so full of crap,” Arthur snaps irritably, not so much because he disbelieves him as because whether he intended to follow through or not, Eames was very much making it clear to that last woman his interest in what she was offering.

Eames throws his arms up in the air, as if pleading to the gods and he’s irritated now, the humour is gone.

“I wasn’t going to fuck her, Arthur! Jesus fucking Christ.”

Then he narrows his eyes curiously, tilts his head with such accusation Arthur knows what he’s going to say before he does.

(Anticipating a punch, it just makes it worse. Arthur  _knows_ this, learned it years ago.)

“But really,” Eames sneers. “So what if I was?”

Arthur fights the ghost of a gut punch that Eames’ expression throws him.

Eames looks at him like it’s a valid question, like it's a reasonable thing to say. Arthur takes a deep breath, but it doesn’t steady his trembling voice.

The street around them feels loud, but there’s no-one in sight anymore, standing at the corner of a dead junction. A street lamp casts orange haze about them, the ugliest shade of sunshine in the world.

“Are you serious?” he asks. “I told y - I said-”

Eames laughs again, even shorter than the first, a tiny little  _Ha_ of pity.

“I heard what you said,” he spits. “And apparently you’ve been fucking whoever you please this whole time.”

Baffled, Arthur splutters around his surprise while Eames glares at him with those thunderstorm eyes of his, as full of threat as the night sky above.

“Like you haven’t screwed anyone else in two years, Eames,” he scoffs.

“I haven’t!” Eames snaps through gritted teeth.

Then Arthur laughs.

Arthur laughs and then Arthur, he pulls an  _oh really_ expression of disbelief, and it might be the worst thing he’s ever done.

Eames’ face falls, the fight sapped out of him in a killing strike. The vodka pink drains out of his cheeks and he pulls back away from Arthur, as if struck by a physical blow.

Arthur’s mouth dries. His lungs shrivel up inside.

“Oh, fuck you,” Eames whispers, a strangle of hurt in those whimpered vowels.

His hands are balled into fists by his sides, but he looks closer to collapsing than throwing punches.

And Arthur, he panics.

“Eames, I didn’t-”

“You cunt,” Eames says quietly, too shocked to do anything but take a step back when Arthur tries to reach towards him through the thick, thundery air. “You absolute cunt.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Arthur tries to scramble but that  _laugh_ again, that sound that’s closer to an earthquake between them, splitting them further apart than they’ve ever been.

“Yes it is,” Eames snaps. He’s shaking. His eyes are wet and so are his cheeks. His words are almost lost around shuddering sobs. "How  _dare_ you? How can you - do you  _seriously_  think that counts?”

The jealousy has contorted into sickening regret in Arthur’s stomach.

He’s going to throw up. He’s going to throw up until his heart leaves his chest through his mouth and splatters on the pavement between them, a rotting sacrifice on the abattoir of the trust they once shared. Eradicated by a fucking laugh.

“Of course I don’t, Eames, you know I don’t,” he says, but apparently Eames  _doesn’t_ know.

His hands are holding his forehead as if he’s worried his skull might crack open as the tears slip into rivers down his face.

 _“They tied me down and fucked me until I was bleeding out, you son of a bitch!”_ he bellows, hollow with anguish, two steps, one back, a stagger as he grips his hair tight.  _“I was so drugged up, it was probably a waste of fucking zip ties!”_

Arthur flinches, his eyes close momentarily and his mouth tightens.

“Eames, please,” he whispers.

Eames isn’t done, though. His silence is broken and through the cracks, all the blame he warned Arthur was lying beneath the surface of his recovery is there, and it’s monstrous in its power.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he sneers, and maybe it echoes down the street, maybe it reaches all the way around the world and back to this place, to them, alone in Cusco, drenched in vodka and other people’s sweat. “Is that too much for your delicate ears? Don’t fancy hearing about it, do you?”

“Eames,” Arthur whimpers, gripping his shirt at the belly to hold the vomit at bay as he trembles. Eames has never looked at him like this before. “Please stop.”

“Why should I?” Eames yells, and he spreads his arms wide, tempting the lightning to strike.

The storm above them, it isn’t ready, but it’s threatening, right there, just like Eames’ pain has been this whole time. It’s been ready for so long and Arthur thought  _he_ was ready to catch it, but he’s not, he's not ready at all.

“Why are you here, Arthur?” Eames growls. “What are you waiting for? For me to just magically wake up one day and decide I’m ready to spread wide for you again?”

“Of course not!” Arthur shouts back. It catches in his chest and it tastes of lies but it’s  _not,_ it  _can’t_ be because this is more than sex,  _they_ are more than sex, aren’t they? Of  _course_ they are. “I want to help you, but you won’t let me!”

Eames cackles, hyena hysterical. It rings into the night about them like tolling bells.

“And why should I?” he cries. Then, taunting, furious, irrationally curious, “Go on. Tell me. Explain to me why I should  _let_ you help me, Arthur.”

He’s definitely never said his name like that before.

“I can’t,” Arthur murmurs.

“What?”

“I can’t!”

“Can’t what?” Eames scorns. “Explain? Or help?”

A siren blares, or a car horn, or maybe it’s a cat yowling. All Arthur can see is Eames’ face, devastated. Those deep tear tracks and those red eyes and that wobbling mouth and that heaving chest and he hitches, crying.

“Both,” he says. “I - both. I just - I want you to be ok.”

Because he’s  _Arthur._ He  _fixes_ things. He does the research and he does the work and he gets things done.

“Well I’m not,” Eames says coldly.

He smears the wetness from his cheeks quickly, embarrassed or annoyed or maybe just taking a moment to hide from his own terrible honesty.

“You know I’m not,” he says, too, and  _oh_ but that’s true.

Arthur’s known all along. It’s why he flew to Bangkok and it’s why he brought them here to neutral ground and it’s why he’s still here, but Eames, he can’t understand that, and that’s Arthur’s fault, as is perfectly clear when Eames continues, icily,

“I haven’t been ok for months, though, Arthur, so I don’t really get what’s changed, except you no longer have Dominick fucking Cobb to look after.”

That’s when Arthur gives in.

His face falls into his palms to catch the tears and he tries not to cry but he feels like those clouds above them, too full, ready to burst. He sniffles and looks up over his splayed fingers and Eames, he looks disgusted.

“Don’t,” he starts, then, licking his lips. “You don’t get to cry, you hear me?” he snaps, pointing a finger of his own at Arthur’s chest this time. He heaves a great, shuddering breath. “You’re not allowed to be -  _kind_ , now. Not after the state you left me in.”

Arthur nods, even though he’s not entirely sure which time Eames means.

(Of course he knows, there’s only one time, that night in Monaco, that sparkling city, blood on Eames’ knuckles.)

 _(So, it's true,_ he said, how could he have said that?)

“I’m sorry,” Arthur gasps, couldn’t hold it in if he tried, not even if he cut out his tongue right here and threw it onto the ground along with his sicked up heart. “I’m so sorry, Eames. Please I can’t - I won’t - I just - I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry-”

He stammers and repeats and flails and Eames moves, just a step.

It’s enough.

“Arthur,” he murmurs, ever so quiet.

That hand reaches out and this time Arthur’s the one to retreat. He pulls away because if Eames touches him now, he’ll topple over and he really will throw up.

“No!” he cries, probably too loudly by the downturn flinch of Eames’ mouth. “I don’t need you to comfort me, Eames.  _Jesus._ I need you to hear me, ok?”

Eames nods at his insistence, a false little jerk of his chin. 

He stands awkwardly, waiting for Arthur to collect himself.

(Those tears, though, those blue grey tears they just keep sliding down that face, that lovely face that Arthur just wants to kiss better, but he can’t.)

“I’m not going anywhere,” Arthur says as calmly as he can with a fist around his lungs. “I know you have no reason to believe me, but I’m staying right here. For as long as it takes.”

Eames looks doubtful. His expression has locked up, unreadable. A painting forged not quite right, monochrome where it shouldn’t be, oil instead of watercolour.

That ugly orange glow makes him look jaundiced and his eyes are glazed.

“As long as what takes?” he asks.

“For you to believe me.”

Eames nods again, looking no more certain than before. He glances across the street and so does Arthur.

An older man watches them, muscular, a cigarette in his hand. He doesn’t look particularly worried. More the curiosity of a drunk trying to figure out their own keysets.

Still, it’s enough to make them start walking, very slowly, several feet apart.

Everything feels so breakable, like a dream about to collapse at any minute.

They’re heading back towards the flat. There’s nowhere else to go and the exhaustion outweighs the heartache. 

Out of the corner of his eye he can see Eames’ tight shuffling gait, his crumpled expression.

When the front door is in sight, Arthur starts rooting through his pockets, doesn’t dare look at Eames until he feels a hand on his arm.

He looks up, whiplash quick.

Eames is standing close.

He’s shorter than Arthur. He’s always shorter than Arthur but it’s not always noticeable. 

Eames is big, more than just round shoulders and hard fists. He has a loud presence and he wears stupid clothes to pretend it’s his dress sense and not his entire goddamn aura that consumes oxygen like it’s a breathing creature of its own.

Eames takes up room the way other people make it and Arthur usually doesn’t notice those few inches that separate their height.

He notices now, though. Eames looks very fucking small right now and that makes Arthur as uncomfortable as anything else. Makes his insides burrow deeper, makes him want to turn away, embarrassed. 

(His father, he sobbed so loudly as they laid his mother to rest and Arthur, whose name wasn't Arthur yet, he was humiliated by the disgrace of it.)

Eames stays close. His hand is warm where it holds Arthur like the roots of an oak tree and he looks at Arthur with something very far away from forgiveness, though nothing close to hatred.

Which, really, is about the best Arthur could possibly hope for at the moment.

“What if I told you to leave?” Eames asks.

Arthur nods, as if thinking about it, but he knows the answer. A small smile creeps over him, tentative, promising. He reaches up to place his own hand over Eames’.

“I’d say tough shit.”

Eames laughs. It’s not real, but it’s not derisive either.

He lets go of Arthur’s arm.

“Ok,” he mumbles. “Ok.”

He drags his feet over the threshold of the building, up the stairs because drunk or not, the elevator is a deathtrap that neither are fond of tempting.

Arthur leads the way, counting every sliding step that follows behind him, all the way into the flat with the barest fumble of the key.

He stops at his bedroom door to watch Eames slowly push his own open.

“Eames?” he says.

Eames looks up at him mutely.

“We can talk in the morning, yeah?”

Eames nods. He looks discomfited, so Arthur turns away to head to bed. His ears are burning and his head is full of marshmallow.

Before he can step inside, a small voice pulls him back.

“Arthur?”

He turns, not quite looking up, his eyes on the small strip of wall that separates their bedroom doors.

“Yes, Eames?”

Eames licks his lips, glances at Arthur’s shoes then back to his face. Arthur musters his cowardly courage and stares back.

He looks drunk, looks awful, looks ready to cry some more.

Outside, the sound of heavy drops of rain. The hum of thunder too far away to feel.

Eames moves quickly. 

Arthur flinches, tries to hold still because he deserves to be punched. He deserves to be kicked and kicked and kicked for tonight, for breaking all the promises he made to himself while he waited for Eames to wake up from his drunken stupor in Bangkok.

But Eames doesn’t punch him.

A pair of arms clutch him tightly, their chests are so close their ribs seem to slot together.

Arthur hugs back, apprehensive at first, then fierce. Eames’ face is in the junction of his throat, still wet with tears. Pressed together like this, Arthur can feel the uncertainty of his breaths, smell every drink on him like he’s sweating it out already.

“Thank you,” Eames says into Arthur’s skin, an invisible tattoo that scars over instantly.

Then he lets go just as quickly, extracts himself with the eagerness of a polecat and slips inside his room before Arthur can reply.

It’s probably for the best, because Arthur has no idea what to say.

.

.

 _Eames, you sent me away,_ Arthur said to mask his speechlessness.

Paris, unforgiving and beautiful.

And Eames, gritting his teeth.

_Yes, and you left._

.

.

I've been told you're very good.

.

.

_(Are you running late? Did you sleep too much? All the awful dreams felt real enough.)_

.

.

Sleep claims him quickly.

It isn’t a tight grip.

.

.

Arthur wakes up when dawn is still only a future promise. He lies on the bed with his spine prickling worse than his guts. He would probably have benefited from throwing up or drinking a glass of water before going to sleep.

Possibly both, he thinks as he blinks through his iron pellet head and gummy bear eyes. He can taste lime and vodka and something dead, maybe a mouse.

Arthur rolls to the left and his stomach follows on a ten second delay of protest. The curtains are open, letting in the grey beige spill of early morning.

He thinks about Eames on the other side of the wall behind his head. 

Thinks about that small smile he offered, like an olive branch, right before he closed the bedroom door behind him. The weight of his fast embrace, the crushing strength of it.

Arthur bites his lip hard. Remembers the look on Eames’ face last night, though it’s a blur of wet drunk salt vodka rain.

He groans, shifting his legs over the bed.

 _We can talk in the morning,_ he had said so easily, because that was a tomorrow-Arthur job.

It’s turned into a now-Arthur job, though, and he’s not sure he’s up for the challenge.

Sitting up takes either an hour or a minute. Everything sloshes inside him, booze and blood and bits of regret that used to be organs.

He’s still wearing his shirt and trousers, but he at least had the presence of mind to take off his belt before crashing.

His room is small, painted an inconspicuous shade of light blue that’s cracked around the door and window frames. Outside, the rain has stopped, but barely. He can still smell the crackle of the lightning.

Slowly he fiddles for his phone, can’t find it.

“Just sleep,” he mumbles to himself.

As usual, he doesn’t heed his own advice.

Once he’s standing, he takes a moment to re-establish his vision as it swims into clearing.

The sick churning in his stomach is surprisingly weaker than it had been when lying down. Not wanting to take any chances, he shuffles slowly out of the room towards the kitchen.

He pauses at Eames’ door, staring at it.

If he wakes Eames up, he’ll probably be in even worse shit than he already is. He can’t help himself, though.

He slowly cracks open the door.

Cold air hits him, and the smell of wet concrete. The window is open, as usual, and the draft is perishing but Arthur wouldn’t dare close it. He peers through the gap to the bed.

Eames has his shirt off, is slumped to one side facing the window with one hand under his pillow. All that's really visible is his roped back and tufts of hair. 

If he were to roll too far, he’d quickly fall off the edge of the bed and Arthur considers helping, but it isn’t worth the risk. If anything, it will probably be a good way to get shocked out of his hangover, anyway.

Arthur stares at his tousled hair and tattooed back for just a moment longer, then closes the door again, blocking out the stillness of sleep that fills the room.

Coffee first. Then he’ll see about waking Eames.

His jacket is on the back of a chair in the kitchen and he vaguely remembers putting his phone there yesterday, after Eames nicked it to go to the shops for more juice.

The pungent smell of the fridge is too much for Arthur and he slams it shut quickly, groaning as he proceeds to fiddle with the coffee pot on the stove instead. The scent of the ground beans is far more welcome, if a little too strong.

As it brews slowly, Arthur returns to his jacket.

The pockets aren’t very deep. He reaches in to pull out the phone and as he does, he feels something else.

At first, he thinks it’s in the pocket but with another rummage he realises it’s in the lining.

For a moment he remembers his totem and his heart clenches, but no, that’s in the suitcase, he knows it is. He checked it before they went out last night.

An unexplainable chill settles over Arthur as he slides his fingers into a tiny slit in the pocket seam of his jacket. He takes hold of the crinkled plastic, extracts it slowly and holds it between both hands, confused.

It’s a small transparent bag, knotted badly with a slap of sellotape over the folded edge.

Inside, lots of fat little white pills.

Arthur breathes in. Breathes out again slowly. His kneecaps feel as if they’re loosening and he takes hold of the back of the chair in front of him.

The smell of coffee starts to bubble through the air, speeding up along with his heart. He looks up at the hallway through the kitchen door, looks at the closed door taunting him.

“Eames,” he tries to shout, but it strangles itself inside his throat and only a retching sound comes out of his mouth.

He doesn’t sense himself moving, doesn’t hear the chair clattering over or feel his shoulder smack into the wall as he runs.

All he knows is that one moment he’s standing in the kitchen and the next, the door of Eames’ bedroom is bursting open so loudly it surely wakes the entire building.

Eames doesn’t stir.

“Eames!” he tries again, louder this time yet even more strangled.

He rips back the covers so violently they catch on the lampshade above and the ceiling light swings, tinkling.

The smell of metal and vomit hits him hard and he doubles over, his stomach broiling as he heaves. Acid burns in his throat and he clutches the bedding that’s still in his grip with white knuckle terror.

He stumbles around the bed to Eames, sees another two of those crinkled little plastic bags on the bedside cabinet.

They’re empty.

They’re shredded and they’re empty and Eames, there’s old streaks of blood along the arm that’s tucked under his pillow and there’s a trail of dry sick down his chest.

Arthur heaves him over and pulls the pillow out from under his head, and he lolls sickeningly and there in Eames’ hand, a knife, clenched tight around the blade so that it cuts deep into his fingers and palm, barely still bleeding, sluggishly forming a crimson halo around his head.

“Eames!” Arthur yells and he smacks Eames’ face once, hard, stinging hard, fighting hard, but Eames’ face just moves with the force, slack as deboned meat.

Panic seizes Arthur and swells inside him and the phone, his phone, it’s still in his hand.

It rings for the central operator even as his heart screams and Eames’ chest refuses to rise, refuses to work, just refuses at all.

“Ambulancia!” he shouts, not just once but over and over, and the operator is jabbering Spanish and Arthur  _can’t speak it,_ not really, that’s why he chose here, so Eames would help him, but Eames is lying on a bed of blood and sick and shit and he isn’t moving, isn’t waking up.

Arthur’s on his knees in a wet puddle by the bed and he’s pulling at the ragdoll that used to be Eames, no, that  _is_ Eames, that will be Eames again if only they’d send a fucking ambulance.

He’s shaking and Eames isn’t and Arthur bellows his name and begs him to  _wake up, just wake up Eames, stop this, stop this now, Eames, don’t you dare._

Eames doesn’t reply though. Eames’ arms and legs flop to Arthur’s will while Arthur howls and pleads and slaps his ribs like breaking them might help.

Those little fistfuls of plastic mock him relentlessly and Arthur wonders how much of this is his own fault and he wonders if they’ll get here in time and he wonders if Eames will forgive him for saving him now after failing to when he  _wanted_ saving.

He takes hold of Eames’ face and tastes bile as he tries to force oxygen down an unwilling windpipe and he isn’t even counting the chest compressions, isn’t even sure if he’s doing it right.

 _You couldn’t kill a man_ Eames had said but worse, so much worse, Arthur is maybe realising that he can’t  _save_ one, either.

He wonders if he made up that  _Thank you_ in his head, wonders if maybe Eames had actually said  _Goodbye_ and Arthur just hadn’t been ready to hear it.

.

.

Most of all, though, he wonders how selfish it is, in this very moment, to hate Eames so much.

.

.

_(Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again.)_

.

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors. ~ Rudyard Kipling, Many Inventions
> 
> Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone. ~ J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
> 
> Are you running late? Did you sleep too much? All the awful dreams felt real enough. ~ Dark Rooms, I Get Overwhelmed
> 
> Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again. ~ Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient


	2. PART TWO

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It doesn’t take much to sniff out dealers in a city the size of Cusco.
> 
> Secrecy folds around the criminal underworld like hospital corners on a bed, tucked so tight it feels stifling. Eames can pick out a supplier in a crowd of thousands, familiar as a beloved painting.
> 
> Arthur, on the other hand, is bizarrely innocent for a criminal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow guys, thanks for the response! Sorry it’s been such a wait between chapters.
> 
> Also just to remind/warn everyone that Eames is kind of a misogynist according to my head-canon for this series. Not massively, but it's there in the background, just waiting to be noticed. I have no idea why. 
> 
> *Once again, please be aware of the tags! There are lots of instances of EXPLICIT suicidal thoughts, intentions and actions here. There are a lot of relatively explicit thoughts about past rape as well.*
> 
> There's a lot of overlap from last chapter, which I was going to avoid, but in the end it seemed silly to. Please do leave a review with your thoughts, you all mean a lot to me. 
> 
> Yours faithfully (and somewhat apologetically…icarusinflight, FreightTrainInMyBrain - I'll get that support group up and running soon...)
> 
> LRCx

.

.

There was that time, a lifetime of dreams ago, when Arthur fell down the stairs.

It’s easier to remember it like this, because it sounds funny. It sounds like a story to be told on round three at a bar, after they’ve started on the sex jokes, before somebody calls for shots.

It sounds like an awkward tale of the ever-collected Point Man carrying too many books, tripping up and tumbling down onto the carpet below like the cute little klutz he is.

It wasn’t funny at the time, though.

It was horrific.

.

.

It happens like this. Exactly like this.

.

.

Eames breaks into the mark’s house first. It’s stately, a townhouse. Georgian London at its finest with the whitewash walls and the Persian rugs and the gilded mirror frames.

He’s been breaking into houses since he was a teenager and it’s comfortable, like treading in warm water on a Sunday in spring. The others follow in seven-minute increments.

Arthur’s the last, of course. He follows up the rear with the PASIV in his hands and his best frown lining his face.

It all goes well, right up to the second where it doesn’t.

There’s a turncoat in their ranks.

Eames thinks it’s probably the Architect. He also guesses there wasn’t supposed to be any trouble, because the mayhem, once it hits, escalates with startling ferocity.

He hears it happen. Hears the yelp of surprise and the clatter-smack of a body rolling down the steep flight of stairs. Hears the silence that follows, like a dull blade through the air.

The Extractor doesn’t think twice before making his escape. He heads for the back of the house and is out of a window while the mark’s brains are still oozing onto the pillow.

Eames’ heart is pounding as he runs towards the landing. He’s stalled by a third attacker at the top of the stairs but with a deep wrench of momentum he buries a knife into the man’s throat.

Looking down the curl of steep stairs below, he freezes.

Arthur’s crumpled on the floor at the bottom. His shoulders twitch and one of his legs kicks out weakly, must have flipped right over himself to be curled so awkwardly into the floor. Blood is pooling into the carpet, seeping like tar over creme.

There’s a tepid, whining sound coming from that pile of twisted limbs, a trembling ache, and it’s rasping, like the piercing of a rib through a vulnerable lung.

Eames rushes down on elephant feet, coaxes him upright with firm hands.

“Get up now. That’s it. There you go.”

It’s not gentle. It’s not kind and it’s not sympathetic.

He’s got maybe three minutes before they’re interrupted by police or more assailants, maybe even both, and he hasn’t hotwired a car in years.

“Shit-shit-shit,” Arthur hisses, spasming in Eames’ grip against the pain.

“I know,” Eames says, distracted. He heaves Arthur upright, muffles his cry of pain with a hand pressed bruising hard over his mouth and starts dragging him towards the front door.

He  _doesn’t_ know, of course.

He just has to hope Arthur isn’t going to bleed out into his lungs before they can get somewhere safe.

He just has to hope Arthur will trust him on this one.

.

.

(He does, but maybe not by conscious choice.)

.

.

“You came back for me?” Arthur slurs, thick with medicine, newly bandaged and speckled with bruises as Eames speeds up the M6 towards Manchester.

He’s lying along the backseat and it’s making Eames nervous. The car is a Volvo that practically radiates the smell of oestrogen and driving it, audaciously  _automatic_ as it is, makes him feel irritable and conspicuous. With nothing else to do and no reasonable answer for Arthur’s question, Eames switches on the CD player and to his surprise, Bruce Springsteen roars out in a clang of guitar and soul.

Hastily turning it down to an acceptable volume, he refrains from making a quip about Arthur feeling more at home, drums his thumbs on the steering wheel to the beat instead.

(He keeps conveniently forgetting to mention to Arthur that he’s found out the truth. That he knows Arthur’s from the swampy outskirts of New Jersey, that he knows his sister is in Ann Arbor with a kid and no mortgage and that his real name is straight out of the Holy Bible.)

“You came back for me,” Arthur laughs again, blissfully sinking into the rhythm of the music and the grumbling of the car.

Slightly hysterical, very drugged.

“You were blocking my exit,” Eames scoffs uncomfortably, which technically speaking is true.

He doesn’t look at Arthur in the rear-view mirror. Doesn’t want to see his expression.

It’s bad enough hearing those quick, broken rib breaths that rattle like pneumonia in his ears.

.

.

There was that time, a lifetime of dreams ago, when Eames made a rape joke at a memorial for his murdered sister.

He still doesn’t know why he did that.

.

.

He thinks about it while he’s rippling, double vision lonely in Bangkok. The tragedy of this mother’s grief ravaged face, the buckled strike of his father’s belt across the stripes of his ribs. The way he stayed in Emmeline’s old room for a week, even though she hadn’t slept there in years.

.

.

_(All suffering originates from craving, from attachment, from desire.)_

.

.

It takes the first two days to ascertain he is not, in fact, dreaming.

He doesn’t mention this to Arthur.

Eames has never lied to Arthur. He’s omitted truths and he’s avoided subjects and he’s been forced into that lowest form of wit on occasion, too. He’s never outright lied though.

He has several solid arguments for why he doesn’t divulge the irrational concern over his waking state to Arthur.

(A few loose ones, too.)

If this is a dream and Arthur is a projection, Eames knows his subconscious is both traitorous enough to lie about it and resilient enough to withstand any real harm coming to him.

If this is a dream and somebody is forging Arthur, they are doing a reasonably good job of it and Eames knows better than to jump the gun in trying to subvert this trickster’s mysterious, awkward care.

If this is a dream and Arthur really is here, well, that’s the most obvious answer of all. The one he hides from, because it would make him vulnerable to acknowledge it.

After two days of rocking about their hotel room, complete with multiple showers, a lot of throwing up and an entire series of Cheers that’s been dubbed in French for reasons unfathomable to both of them, Eames is quite certain this is reality.

For one thing, he hasn’t had a drop of alcohol since the bar Arthur hauled him out of and any half decent dream would surely let him get wasted, would at the very least allow him respite from what is turning out to be a mild case of withdrawal.

Arthur doesn’t say anything about it. He just orders a variety of foods and amenities from room service and taps away on his laptop and forgoes his pomade like a heathen.

In fact, he seems to be acting disturbingly casual about all of this.

He keeps a polite distance. Tells him about Peter Browning walking out on Fischer-Morrow following the initial dissolution period of the company. Orders food with extra ginger to help settle Eames’ stomach.

It’s as if he doesn’t mind, as if he doesn’t intend to scold Eames at all for this reckless, downright self-destructive behaviour.

Eames knows he shouldn’t feel neglected by this blatant respect for his privacy.

(Blinky Bill, Emmeline used to call him, when he was three and eternally unhappy whenever he wasn’t holding onto a lock of her hair with a tight, chubby fist.)

He stands in front of the bathroom mirror and fails again and again to forge a new face, just about ready to accept he really is here, in the heart of Bangkok.

Outside the bathroom door he can hear Arthur on the phone, bickering good naturedly which means it’s probably one of the Cobb children that he occasionally tries to insist he doesn’t adore.

Eames looks in the mirror, looks at the prickling stubble over his jaw and the tired swells of skin beneath his eyes. He looks surprisingly better than he feels, which should be a point of concern because he’s fairly certain he looks like upgraded roadkill.

Maybe Arthur doesn’t know how bad he feels. Maybe he’s finally achieved the great con of misdirection that is deceiving dreamshare’s most reliably conscientious Point Man.

Outside, Arthur lets out a short, jabbering laugh.

That’s when Eames realises it. Some secret hidden in that laugh astounds him and he realises, Arthur _hasn’t noticed._

Rather, Arthur probably thinks this is some sort of extended alcohol poisoning.

He hasn’t figured out that Eames isn’t shaking so badly because he’s still fighting the effects of his tequila and tanqueray binge. He’s shaking because he needs more of it.

The bathroom light hums a little, fly small and flickering every four and a half minutes. The air is still warm from the shower and the tiles are still wet.

Eames grits his teeth and swallows the thorns in his throat.

Arthur’s right, he  _did_ swear off tequila years ago and now it isn’t so much awkwardness as shame that keeps the truth of his body’s weakness in the back of his mouth where it belongs, far from Arthur’s attentive ears.

Because he doesn’t want Arthur to know, not if he can help it.

He likes the benefit of Arthur’s doubt.

So he doesn’t say anything.

He showers through the worst of it and after a few days, José’s grip loosens from around his spine.

He eats breakfast without upchucking a few hours later, then lunch and half a dinner.

Arthur grins that shiny boyish grin of his, satisfied with Eames’ progress and Eames, pathetic  _fuck_ that he is, actually blushes under his attention, feeling pleased to earn himself some approval.

.

.

(For digesting food.)

.

.

(Good God, has it really come to this?)

.

.

“I think we should go to Cusco,” Arthur says, deaf to Eames’ inner torment.

Eames stares out of the window at the high rises, wrapped in a hoodie, his hair dripping wet down his neck.

What he really wants is to go to that flat in Marrakech that he nicked from a dead mark.

It’s light there, spice and cigarettes. It’ll be dry desert scorching this time of year. Ramadan at its peak, the city bursting vibrant with the kissing close of sunset every night.

Peru, on the other hand, will be lingering in the wet-gentle warmth of the Amazon’s outskirts. It’ll be pleasant and touristy and it will probably rain.

But Arthur, he looks so pleased with himself. And perhaps pride really is a sin, but if so it’s one that Arthur wears better than most, like a perfectly tailored suit.

Eames nods, scratches at the scruff on his chin.

“Alright,” he says, the same way Arthur muttered it from the back of the car when Eames told him  _We’re going to Manchester_ all those years ago.

Arthur starts packing with unrepentant enthusiasm.

.

.

They go to Cusco.

.

.

(There’s a pause in their journey, just as they begin. The bar, with the its dirty backroom and the dull silver of the handle of the pistol heavy in a meaty hand. He tries to feel bad for stranding Arthur in an alley while he slips inside, however temporarily, but Thailand is so bloody stringent with its drug trade and this really is the only place he trusts to give him a decent hit of coke before he has to spend God knows how long pretending he isn’t craving oblivion with every petty pulse of his heart.)

.

.

“Don’t hurt him,” Mallorie warned, once.

They sit side by side outside a train station in Lyon, lemon and lime. Sunglasses slippery over the sweaty bridges of their noses.

It’s abrupt, candid.

That’s Mallorie all over though. This abrupt and candid nymph of Morpheus.

Eames purses his lips, thoughtfully cocks his head. Refuses to cow to her piercing glare.

“You can’t ask that of me,” he says coolly, flicking idly through the magazine left on the bench beside him.

He shows her a particularly skin heavy image that’s supposed to be promoting shampoo, but for once she doesn’t take the bait.

“Why not?” she demands.

No,  _that’s_ Mallorie. Recalcitrant, glowing with potential and resistant to those that try to crush it with their pessimism.

“You can only get hurt if you let someone hurt you,” he says. At her arched brow, he adds, “Unless you just meant don’t punch him in the face, but I have a feeling you didn’t.”

Mallorie lights a cigarette that she’ll later blame the smell of on Eames, and Eames will stare back at an accusatory Cobb with a defiant, blank expression.

Through the stream of smoke issuing from her mouth, Mallorie says,

“Sometimes people hurt us anyway. Even if we try not to let them.”

She smiles tightly. Her lips are dark pink, leaving a smudge on her cigarette, and her eyelashes are very long as they flutter in a slow blink.

“But do not punch him in the face either, please. It’s a very pretty face.”

Her eyes glitter like fireworks in the ink of night and that look, right there, is what he thinks about the day she dies.

.

.

These butterfly challenges, they come back to haunt him.

.

.

He breaks his word, eventually. The one he didn’t actually promise.

Punches that pretty face hard enough to bruise his own knuckles.

He didn’t know he was capable of doing that. Like a rape joke at a funeral.

Meanwhile, Mal proves him wrong from beyond the grave.

It’s unexpected, the realisation that she had been right, that he had been wrong. Before Arthur, Eames hadn’t felt stung by another person since Emmeline lied about coming back for him.

(As it turns out, sometimes people get hurt anyway.)

.

.

So, they go to Cusco, and there they stay.

.

.

They get a cab from the airport and the driver is chatty, if stilted in his English.

He trips into Spanish muttering a few times, to which Eames responds in kind. Latin languages have always been his closest allies.

Arthur wants a hotel, naturally.

Eames shuts him down quickly with a blithe tease.

They stroll through a wide, open plaza, sky pink and blue. He’s exhausted from the journey and he doesn’t have a sick stomach to blame anymore.

The truth is, he doesn’t want to have to answer the questions that come with checking into a hotel.

One room or two?

Double or twin?

He doesn’t want to deal with Arthur’s presumptions. Nor does he want to suffer the lingering effects of making that kind of choice right now.

He stops at a vendor selling burning, caramelised nuts. Buys two cups and forces one into Arthur’s free hand.

Arthur’s watching him closely while pretending not to. It’s an art that, on any other occasion, Eames might have enjoyed observing.

This is why Eames doesn’t want to make the one-room, two-room choice yet.

It won’t feel like a  _for now_ choice. It will feel like a forever choice and honestly, Eames doesn’t know how he’ll feel in twelve hours, never mind twelve months.

So instead he crunches on some almonds, bitter and sweet and sticking easily to the trappings of his teeth, and says he knows someone who can hook them up with a flat.

Behind him, a voice that is clearly trying not to sound too irate.

“Who’s your friend?” Arthur asks.

They circle a tall, finely carved fountain. Beds of flowers that smell of wet soil.

(He  _knew_ it would be rainy.)

Eames smirks; doesn’t need Arthur to physically do the air quotes to hear them in his tone.

“A man who taught me how to disable alarms in art galleries. Although not jewellery shops, apparently.”

Arthur doesn’t get the joke. Seems to accept he doesn’t need to and shrugs it off easily enough.

“You’re not just calling him for the poker joints, are you?”

Eames takes the offered out gladly.

He pulls an innocent expression, fluttering his eyelashes as he replies deviously,

“Darling, you think so little of me.”

.

.

They don’t talk about it.

Eames is confused, suspicious. He’s fairly certain this is supposed to be an intervention.

If Arthur wants to lull him into a false sense of security first, he should know by now that Eames is the master of long games. He is the player, not the played.

Still, he goes along with it on the first night, because it’s  _fun._ It’s easy being with Arthur, even when everything else is awful.

They talk and jibe and cheer on football teams they don’t care about and it feels about as close to normal as Eames ever feels anymore. He orders orange juice and Arthur orders lemonade and it’s all surprisingly civilised.

The bar is full of striped football shirts and it smells of beer and the lights are so low that even the flickering tv sets are more useful than the lamps. Arthur’s eyes look very dark and his mouth looks very wet and he sits closer to Eames than he dared to in Bangkok.

Eames drinks his orange juice and sits back in his chair and keeps the angles of his worries as soft as kneaded dough.

The attack never comes.

Arthur skates around topics as elegantly as blades scraping over ice and not once does he so much as nudge at Eames’ fortified barriers.

Isn’t that what this is? Isn’t that why Arthur’s  _here?_

.

.

 _(You deserved to know,_ Arthur had said on that first morning back in Thailand and he had meant it, Eames knows he did. So why isn’t he asking the questions he so obviously wants to voice now?)

.

.

Paranoia is a toothy demon.

It latches easily and is very difficult to extract once those jaws have clamped shut.

Eames sneaks some vodka into his orange juice the following morning. Not much, just enough to take the edge off wondering what game Arthur’s playing.

.

.

By now, it’s been over a year since the Walker-Stoneley Job. Eames has ticked off the months in his head like an advent calendar.

He put these ghouls to bed a while ago, buried them in the Sahara and now they’re crawling back out of the Amazon to find him, to ensnare him in doubt and fear.

He put these ghouls to bed by himself, through a concentrated regimen involving Jameson’s whisky and unmarked pills and the pale buzz of gambling. Not to mention a PASIV to build sandcastles of his fears, only to kick them down with unidentified petulance.

Eames has replayed those torturous weeks in full, lived them out over and over until the sight of Frankie Moran’s face doesn’t make him tremble and the feel of a hand on the back of his neck doesn’t make him gag. Until he has overcome the smell of damp and the crushing weight, the taste of the floor and the burn of the rags around his eyes.

He had laughed at Mallorie for thinking dreams might help more than just extracting the useful pieces, that they might cauterise the open wounds of trauma.

There was tragic irony in her downfall, of course.

.

.

The thing is, there’s tragic irony in Eames’, too.

.

.

The Cusco flat is tiny.

The windows open wide and the kitchen has deep cupboards and on the second morning, Arthur cooks eggs.

“I’ve got a plan,” Arthur announces, wearing dark grey sweatpants and a t-shirt that still isn’t creased despite being slept in. Eames wonders idly if Arthur irons his sleepwear, too.

“Don’t you always?” he teases instead of asking.

Arthur narrows his eyes and crunches too much pepper into the pan.

Eames is on toast duty and being very lazy about the whole ordeal. He scrapes twice as much butter as he should onto each slice in turn, just to see at what point Arthur gives up and does it himself.

“What’s your plan?” Eames prompts when Arthur simply glares at his butter knife.

“Sacsayhuamán,” Arthur replies.

Absolute delight bursts in a choke of laughter out of Eames’ mouth, surprising even himself. He splutters and nudges Arthur with his elbow.

“Your pronunciation needs some work,” he sniggers.

Arthur is unruffled, stoic in his determination, his  _plans._

His eyes are gritty hazel today and his hair looks longer than it has done in a while.

Eames wonders, sometimes, if Arthur is either the most self-aware man in the world, or the least.

He’s certainly self-conscious, has been for as long as Eames has known him. He’s meticulous, right down to the way he scrambles eggs: methodical, efficient, neat.

“We should walk up there today,” he says in that determined,  _planning_ voice of his.

“Should we?” Eames asks, sliding the plates of toast onto the table.

He doesn’t want to. The fuzz of indifference is blanketing him and he’s loath to break its hold. He can see it now, the lumbering hill, the ancient architecture that Arthur won’t even care about because Arthur is modernity. He’s designer suits and automatic weapons and satellite signals.

Eames is none of these things.

Eames is oil paint and charcoal, fountain pens and paid off coppers.

It’s no wonder they’re always bickering, really.

Yet here’s Arthur, stirring a pan of peppered eggs, suggesting Inca archaeology when he probably wouldn’t know it from a Roman fort without Eames to lecture him about it.

Eames can feel Arthur’s earnestness pouring out of him, bitter and sharp and welcome as the coffee hissing the pot.

“Didn’t realise you’d take such a keen interest in the local history.”

“You’re being facetious,” Arthur murmurs through pursed lips.

Eames idly entertains the thought of kissing that pout.

He doesn’t. Doesn’t even really think about it, actually. Just notices the hollow absence of the urge to do so with a melting pang of regret.

“Am I?” he asks.

Swerves out of the way of Arthur’s return elbow nudge without meaning to.

Ignores the downward twitch of Arthur’s mouth.

Ignores everything except the bubbling frustration in his gut that his spoiled orange juice doesn’t temper.

.

.

That night, after Sacsayhuamán has been defeated and the bridge of Eames’ nose is pink with sunburn, he dreams about that isolated beach in the south of France.

How the sand burned his knees and thighs, the way he felt like he was turning to glass as the sun skinny-dipped into the sea, the sky blushing pink at their shamelessness.

The hiss of air between Arthur’s teeth and the taste of him, the salt and lime slide of him, the way he folded up like an oyster and stretched out like a starfish.

The way he snarled orders like they were taking fire, but it was just the sand scorching their flushed skin. That sand that chafed Eames halfway to Hades and got stuck in places where sand should never be and he almost didn’t care, because of that cavernous mouth and those hard, bruising hands, the way they belonged to him like nothing had ever really belonged to him before.

Eames wakes up hard and thinks,  _that’s normal._

Then he throws up everything he’s ever so much as thought about eating and thinks,  _that’s not._

.

.

He dreams a lot these days, which isn’t very unusual.

Eames hasn’t stopped dreaming yet. Not like most of the others.

Maybe it’s because he breaks up dreamshare jobs with other, more easily traceable ones. Maybe he has such a good imagination it transcends brain damage, maybe he just has extra strong neurons and a natural immunity to dreamlessness.

Whatever the case may be, Eames can still dream, still  _does_ dream regularly.

He thinks Arthur might not dream anymore. Can’t bring himself to ask, though, because it feels too cutting, too personal.

(There are things more intimate than being inside a person, than letting them inside you. Your defenceless heart and your open mouth.)

Eames dreams in colour, in noise.

He dreams about things he might otherwise forget, like what Arthur sounds like after his third orgasm, the one he swore would be impossible, or fatal, or both.

Dreams about how warm his sister’s hands were on his face the day she left, the smear of red lipstick on her chin that looked like blood.

.

.

They climb again. And again.

They drink water and retrace their steps and they talk about nothing, talk too much about nothing at all.

.

.

And Eames, he waits, like a jaguar among the trees.

.

.

(He thinks Arthur might be waiting, too.)

.

.

Cusco is details.

Every city is details, really, just like the people that inhabit them.

There’s a piece of graffiti on a wall just visible out of Eames’ window. It’s a tiger stripe of slander, big yellow eyes and a tail of curse words.

Eames spies a hooded figure adding a line of prints from its splayed paws one night.

He leans into the frame out of his open window, feels the hot breath of the wind bringing old rain and the smell of damp wood burning. Watches a gloved hand work fastidiously over the lines of the tiger’s tracks.

He wishes he had a cigarette. Not that he ever particularly enjoyed smoking, but it would feel good in his hand.

The artist slinks away into the looming night, his masterpiece amended.

Eames rolls the pill that’s been sitting beneath his tongue for the past twenty minutes over his teeth, slowly disintegrating into his gums.

It makes his mouth taste gritty numb with chemicals, makes his anxiety loosen in his corded throat.

.

.

 _You’re not just calling him for the poker joints, are you?_ Arthur had asked.

.

.

Eames doesn’t lie to Arthur, not really.

He just omits certain truths.

.

.

There’s a cafe that they frequent.

Lemon yellow and buttercream soft. The coffee is diamond delicious and the tables creak with age. Every day they make the short journey, find a new table with a new view of the street outside or the bar inside, as if they are scoping the joint and can’t make their minds up about the exit route.

There’s a waitress who is called Sofia, which Eames figures out on the third visit.

She has a tiny nervous tick, so finely tuned it takes Eames even longer to find it than her name.

She cocks her hip to the right when she’s uncomfortable. She’s most uncomfortable around women that are middle aged or older.

The obvious answer is mummy issues, but the more Eames watches her the more convinced he becomes that it’s something else.

She wears a surprisingly heavy looking crucifix around her neck and her thumbnails are painted luminous blue.

She’s pretty and birdlike and she covers up her dark skin with varying shades of grey that don’t suit the spark in her coffee ink eyes.

“Do you think she’s happy?” he asks when Arthur kicks his chair one day.

Arthur watches her, shrewd and calculating.

“Maybe,” he says. “I don’t think she’s  _very_ happy.”

Eames sips his iced tea. The glass knocks against his teeth, sending a brain deadening chill through his gums.

“Me neither,” he says.

Sofia looks up at him from across the room, as if the weight of his stare had fallen too hard upon her gentle face. She smiles the polite, wretched smile of the deeply unhappy.

Eames smiles back.

.

.

It wasn't always like this, of course.

.

.

“You’re a liar!” Arthur shouts, full of delight.

They are in Seville, orange town, dustbowl shelter. Eames prefers Valencia but here they are, drinking too much sangria and playing dominoes and boasting their jobs to each other like children in the playground.

“I kid you not!” Eames insists through his laughter.

Arthur shakes his head, disbelieving.

His lips are wine red and he’s loosened his tie, looks positively relaxed.

“She was not a princess,” Arthur insists, topping up their glasses and helping himself to the last olive.

“What can I say? We Brits have an affinity for royalty.”

He waggles his eyebrow as he says it.

The city is firefly fluttering, alive with the smoky heat of high summer. Hot and itchy and cloying.

Arthur’s face is pink with delight, a sweaty flush of joy that Eames has never seen before, not on this face, where belligerence usually digs its heels in like a grouchy squatter.

He’s happy and so is Eames. He’s happy even when Arthur picks up a carafe of orange juice and dumps it all over him for accusing him of being a rubbish criminal.

.

.

(This is one of the good ones, the best ones, sun-kissed collarbones and starstruck laughter.)

.

.

It stays with him, a bright spot in the blankness, like a puckered scar, shining over the stretch of otherwise unblemished skin.

.

.

_(Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.)_

.

.

But see Arthur, he isn’t asking the right questions.

Keeps coming up with new ones, meaningless ones. Ones that Eames doesn’t like to ask himself.

.

.

“Why do you hate your real name?”

It blindsides him, salt instead of sugar. Eames feels Arthur’s curiosity like a needle.

They’re walking through the oldest monastery, roughly hewn stone and weedy flowers that decorate it like a mural.

Arthur isn’t looking at him, which is either kindness or cowardice.

(They are intrinsically linked, of course.)

Eames regains his composure quickly, drags his feet along the echoing stone and traces his hand over the nearest wall. The skim is sharp and numbing over his fingertips, as if he might scrape them right off, should he so wish.

“Why do you think I hate it?” he asks with delicate evasiveness. Arthur is half a step ahead and he can see the glow of his red ears easily enough.

“You’re very defensive about it.”

His voice is amplified by the lonely stones, grander, deeper.

“So are you,” Eames retorts.

“No,” Arthur replies, glancing over his shoulder at Eames’ shoes. “I’m protective. There’s a difference.”

There’s tooth-gritting truth to that. Eames knows it.

Arthurs still wrong, though. It isn’t the name he hates so much. In another life, he’d never have dared part with it.

“Do you remember being a kid?” he asks instead.

“Of course,” Arthur scoffs.

Eames refrains from making a quip about how that’s because he’s still all of fifteen judging by his looks, though it’s a near thing.

“No,” he presses. “I mean really  _remember._ How it felt to feel that, that petulant anger, to feel like nobody in the whole world could possibly understand you? To really believe in things, things you’d grow up and feel embarrassed to admit to.”

Arthur slows his walk, and in the interim takeover catches his eye. A solemn look passes between them like lightning in a storm, potent, fleeting.

“Yes,” Arthur says, the quiet confidence of a point man.

Eames looks away, looks at the bare walls kissed smooth by prayer.

“I don’t,” Eames replies. “Not really.”

Arthur’s still looking at him, a hard stare, a calculating one. Their footsteps are perfectly in time with each other.

Eames sighs quietly to himself.

“I don’t hate the name they gave me,” he says. “But it’s not my  _real_ name. He doesn’t exist anymore. Just like Jack doesn’t exist anymore either.”

Eames doesn’t check to see if Arthur nods or frowns. He doesn’t think that counts as a lie, because he believes it. Believes it wholly, despite being unsure it’s entirely accurate.

Of course William Nicholls still exists. As long as he’s a cold case on the Cambridgeshire Police’s shelves, he still exists, a truculent relic of an unforgotten past.

“I think it scares me, the thought that the old me doesn’t exist anymore,” Arthur confesses softly. He’s church mouse shy as he looks ahead down the corridor stretching before him.

Eames stares down into the long dark, too.

He thinks about Serbia, the unhelpful taxi driver and the hotel clerk who snuck a first aid kit into their room service. He doesn’t reply, not this time.

.

.

A thought has occurred to him, one he has entertained time and again, an unwelcome dinner guest that no matter how badly ignored, just keeps coming back for more.

It returns now. It sits with him in the silence of his loneliness and the chatter of Arthur’s presence.

Arthur doesn’t seem to notice that there is a third occupant in this little vacation of theirs. A spectre that has escaped the darkness of Eames’ mind.

It dances between them tauntingly and every time it reveals itself, Eames feels the pull of its force, like a needle drawn to the mercy of North.

.

.

He thinks about it while he’s in the kitchen, first.

There’s a thin wall between the fridge and the bathroom, the sounds amplified by the tile scatter of water and porcelain. He hears a wet gasp slap coming from the other side of the wall, a sound so familiar it aches inside him.

He cringes a little and moves to the window, where the air is cooler.

The room smells of parsley and bread.

The knife is hot in his hand, white knuckle clench.

.

.

“Where the fuck did I put it?” Arthur snarls later.

Eames hears it from his bedroom.

The fingers of guilt don’t touch him through the fog of his defiance.

.

.

And, emboldened by his success, Eames reaches out further.

.

.

It doesn’t take much to sniff out dealers in a city the size of Cusco.

Secrecy folds around the criminal underworld like hospital corners on a bed, tucked so tight it feels stifling. Eames can pick out a supplier in a crowd of thousands, familiar as a beloved painting.

Arthur, on the other hand, is bizarrely innocent for a criminal.

(Perhaps that’s why Eames feels a surge of fierce possessiveness at the sight of him with a gun in his hand.)

It’s easy to sneak away under the pretence of  _coffee_ or  _orange juice_ or  _paper._

He slips out of the backstreet behind the flat, fists in the pockets of the tan jacket and hunching into his collarbones a little.

He wonders how it came to this.

Rather, he wonders if it was inevitable this is what would become of him. The back of his neck is slippery and his chest feels hollow.

He thinks about the way Arthur watches him from across the table every morning, the bite of accusation in his eyes when he takes too long in the shower.

.

.

 _I think I’m a little in love with you,_ Eames said to Arthur, years ago.

 _You’re not so bad yourself,_ Arthur had joked back, pink with sea spray and loud over the crashing Mediterranean waves.

Eames wasn’t upset at the time, drunk on salty kisses. But he thinks about it now and it twinges between his ribs like an old stitch, that dismissal, however encouraging Arthur’s wandering hands had been.

So Eames, he wakes up from a nightmare and he stares at the ceiling and he thinks about confronting Arthur now, trapped in this tiny flat, this flushed city.

To demand an answer to the question he's silently been asking for years.

.

.

 _Can I help you, darling?_ Eames offered the day they met.

It’s starting to feel like he set a precedence that dusty whisky morning in London, one that is unsustainable for the him of tomorrow to carry.

He’s set a bar for himself among his criminal counterparts. As an art fence he’s fickle and as a dream forger he’s unreliable. As a lover he’s selfish and as a friend, well, he isn’t.

Arthur’s seen through most of these mirages.

Not all of them, though.

.

.

 _You sold me out,_ Arthur snarled down the phone while Eames sat in a hospital waiting room, tapping his heels into the lino and irritating the nurses with his disrespect for protocol.

 _Of course I did,_ Eames replied jovially with his eyes on the receptionist’s thin pink mouth.

This isn’t a lie, he tells himself, because selling implies payment, and technically speaking he was rewarded handsomely.

.

.

(Life, after all, is the most precious gift of all.)

.

.

_(You shall love, whether you like it or not.)_

.

.

Stoicism, it turns out, is a genetic trait.

It bled through every choice his sister made and it coloured the bricks of the wall built high between himself and his parents. He knows that they filed a missing persons report the week after he left for good, and he knows they kept up a watercolour appearance of hopeful parents for at least a year before retiring quietly to their losses.

His mother, with her charity parties and her gowns and her French perfume. His father, with his oily hair and his clenched jaw and his neat hand gestures over the office desk.

(There is a word for a parentless child, but there is no word for a childless parent, and he supposes that’s unfair.)

Eames learns the stiff upper lip because it’s a national inheritance; he keeps it because without it, he’s not sure what he’d find underneath, what would be unleashed if he bared the teeth of his weaknesses.

So while he's in Cusco, he keeps the knife in his bedside cabinet and he keeps the pills taped under his bed frame and he goes jogging when Arthur baits him into it, because the only way he’s going to stop feeling helpless is by pretending he gives a shit about Tai Chi, apparently.

Until he locks the bathroom door and Arthur, he has the gall to sound  _angry_ about it.

Shame spreads over Eames like a loosening snake skin, eager to be shed, impossible to disentangle himself from.

He tries to tell himself it’s common modesty, perfectly acceptable. He doesn’t owe Arthur anything for the miles of nakedness they have shared over the years.

Yet it leaves him nauseous to think what he’d have done if he hadn’t locked the door, if Arthur had really walked in.

.

.

(It’s not that, not really. It’s the open door, his  _bedroom door,_ his bedroom, with the knife and the pills and the note, the one he’s going to destroy because if Arthur finds it, it’s game over. He’ll never get that piece of himself back.)

.

.

_(Was your work of art so heavy that it would not let you live?)_

.

.

There was that time, a lifetime of dreams ago, when Oskar Selvig snatched Arthur from an airport in Luxembourg. When pure luck intervened to alter their timelines.

Eames is almost two thousand miles away and he has two small icons circa Ramses II to fence. He uses the name Sampson when he’s fencing heritage art, because he’s a creature of poisonous nostalgia.

He meets a woman called Cora whom he will almost certainly use as a partial forge one day and she gives him the cash with a brisk cat’s smile, her sunglasses perched on her head glinting in the Grecian sun.

“Pleasure, Sam,” she says coolly, hand tight around the briefcase at her feet.

Eames kisses her cheek and departs, wearing his smugness like a crown.

He gets back to his hotel room just in time for his phone to start ringing. It’s Cobb, sounding alarmed.

“Eames, have you heard from Arthur?”

Eames moves to stand on the balcony outside. Behind him, a thin curtain rustles and below, traffic growls and jars through the street.

“Not since Belgium,” he says with thinly veiled threat, is surprised when Cobb actually curses. “What’s wrong?” he demands.

Cobb makes a strangled, ugly sound.

“He was supposed to be back in California yesterday.”

Stones grind in Eames’ gut.

“And you waited until now to track him down?” he snarls, ending the call with a snap. “Fucking civilians,” he mutters as he trudges back inside.

It takes trial and error and almost all the money the lovely Cora has just given him, but he finds Arthur in forty-six hours, which is only slightly longer than it took Arthur to find him last November when everything went tits up in Canterbury.

He’s in Beograd. Eames gets there late in the evening and when he does it's to find Arthur looking like a very cross raccoon with his matching black eyes and puffy lower lip.

“‘Inally!” he crows when Eames steps over Selvig’s body and starts untying him from the metal chair he’s strapped to.

“Oi,” Eames chuckles. “You’ve just cost me a pretty penny and a job in Pakistan, I’ll have you know. Be grateful it wasn’t your dear Cobb coming after you or you’d have been here all bloody week.”

Arthur hisses as Eames peels the cording out of his badly rubbed wrists. The skin is broken on the outsides of both arms and by the way he moves gingerly to standing, Eames is sure he’ll find bruising from his hips to his shoulders.

Arthur smiles weakly, wincing as it pulls his swollen lip.

“Come on, dear,” Eames says. “There’ll be more on their way and I’m afraid I’m a little low on weaponry.”

He doesn’t carry Arthur out into the dazzling Serbian night, but it’s a near thing.

They sleep side by side in a hotel bed without so much as a kiss exchanged between them, barring the very faint press of Arthur’s lips to his palm as Eames checks his cheekbones for hidden breaks.

“Thank you,” Arthur whispers into the pillow as they curl like speech marks into each other beneath the covers of the bed.

Eames rests his hand up above his dark hair, fingers tickling through the loose, greasy strands.

“Try not to get thrown into anymore lion’s dens, hmm?” he murmurs gently.

Arthur open his eyes blearily. Surrounded by a swollen mass of purple bruising, his eyes are questioning; they burn with suspicion. He smiles as faintly as his split lip will allow.

“How long’ve you known?” he asks.

The drugs are taking him fast. Eames strokes his scalp gently and laughs.

“Oh, forever, love,” he says.

Sleep claims them in the resting pause of their slow breaths.

When they wake up, the sun is cresting and Cobb is calling. Eames switches off his phone, orders them soup and bread and some more bandages from the hotel reception downstairs.

.

.

This is what Eames thinks of in the small hours, the day before the night that might have been his last.

This is what drives him to ask that stupidest of questions.

.

.

 _What are we doing?_ he asks, because he’s such a bloody masochist.

.

.

“What are we doing?” he foolishly asks while they sit in their cafe watching the flinching Sofia take orders and wait tables and smile that unhappy smile of hers that Eames has grown so fond of.

He asks it because he’s absolutely certain that whatever the answer, it will be better than not knowing, that nothing Arthur could possibly think of saying will be unwelcome.

And the truth is, Eames has never thought of himself naive before, but maybe he is. Arthur’s got such a kind face when he smiles, and that smile has been frequent here in South America, the creeping wet season.

So he doesn’t prepare himself for Arthur to scrunch his nose and tilt his head and then say, so puppy love eager,

“I think it’s time we stop pretending we’re not, you know. Us. I want to be with, you know. Just you. Nobody else.”

Ice curdles like milky tequila in Eames’ stomach at that one. He feels the particles of his anxiety stiffen his muscles, shift between the plates of his skull.

 _I thought we already were,_ he wants to say, but just how pathetic would that make him? What would Arthur think of him?

Humiliation seems to bleed into everyday life for Eames, by now, and in that moment, with Arthur’s simple smile of hope, it strikes him where he sits.

Because Arthur, he looks so proud of himself, so certain in his affection and really, who cares if he took five years to realise what Eames knew in five months?

He should be pleased. Hell, he should be  _grateful,_ all things considered. Arthur knows everything, doesn’t need explanations or justifications, he _already knows,_ and this is everything Eames has craved, so why is he suddenly so mad?

There’s fire in Arthur’s eyes, familiar, fierce, and Eames is struck with a blow of his concern.

What if Arthur doesn’t realise?

What if Arthur thinks a jog up a hill and a few long lies is all Eames needs to get back on his feet?

Does Arthur think he’s all better now?

Panic swells behind the dam of Eames’ denial like a biblical flood and he clamps it down.

All this in the space of a few blood freezing seconds, barely enough time for Eames to slide his expression into a smirk, so unreal he’s  _forged_ people that felt more natural.

“Well,” he murmurs, praying the quiver in his voice goes unnoticed. “I am quite the catch, I suppose.”

.

.

Arthur doesn’t broach the subject again, which is either wonderful or terrible.

So Eames, riddled with unease, takes matters into his own hands.

He needs a drink, goddamnit. One that’s shameless, to gulp and forget at a gallop. To pulse through him like hallucinogens in the neon fix of night.

.

.

“No way,” Arthur growls, a bedroom sound, his teeth bared like a tiger.

Eames just hurries him along at a skipping pace.

The night is salty with the promise of thunder. A storm has been brewing for days and it’s about to erupt.

The only question, really, is which will break first.

The sky, or his heart.

He’s got a credit card in one pocket and six pills in the other.

Eames feels eager like he hasn’t done since he was a teenager, pumped and primed and racehorse ready.

He all but shoves Arthur at the first girl to ask for a dance, then downs three shots of blistering gold, clinking glasses with a woman who laughs loudly at his questionable blend of Portuguese and Spanish, then sticks her tongue in his ear when she leans in to ask him for a dance.

Arthur visibly tries to catch his eye more than once. Eames, however, has a reputation of evasiveness.

He is, after all, the face changer who carries a mobile phone with three contacts, who has successfully convinced most of the world that he’s of Italian origin with royalty in his blood.

Eames sinks into the cushion of the crowd where he is promptly caught, tumbled, turned and released to the thrumming bass of the speakers that line the upper decks.

Terror dampened by the first two pills and comfortably drowsy with adrenaline, Eames sways between two lithe bodies, hands snaking up and down him like he’s cattle at a beef market and he feels  _good._

He doesn’t care, not at all. He’s a drop in an ocean and a speck of dust among the stars.

Fingers tug at his sleeve and he waves it away, or maybe just ignores it.

There’s a billowing, bellowing sound that might be his name. Then that hand again, harder.

He blinks, two shadows of Arthur swimming bright turquoise and pink in the disco dream.

He’s gesturing to the door and Eames tries to follow but hands hold him back.

Arthur tugs yet again, the world dances in lights like the sun on the sea and like a cannonball he’s released. They surge through the crowd together, Eames’ stomach lurching and Arthur’s hand tight on his wrist, pulling him on like to Orpheus out of the black.

They fall into the night outside, the starless sky full of rain ready to drop, the air thick with voices and silence and heat.

Arthur yanks hard and Eames, boneless, fearless, follows at a trot. Arthur’s walking stiffly and every line of him seems to quiver with agitation.

“Ugh, bore,” Eames teases loudly, maybe louder he means to.

The vodka’s sharp in his throat. There’s one pill left in his pocket and he momentarily considers trying to sneak it out and crunch it down. Arthur’s grip is too tight, though, he’s moving too fast, so instead Eames jabbers inane questions at him.

Arthur doesn’t respond, though, and with futile impatience Eames wrenches his wrist out of Arthur’s hand.

They stutter to a stop on the pavement, alone, sweltering, swathed in the basking orange of the streetlights.

Arthur’s panting, sweat drips down his face and he’s trembling. He looks utterly furious, which is ridiculous because he wanted to leave the club and now they’ve left. He’s got nothing to be angry about.

If anything, it should be  _Eames_ looking cross right now.

“What’s gotten into you?” he prods delicately and braces himself for the usual tirade about reckless drinking and how he’s supposed to be  _off_ the tequila and how dancing to anything that uses computers instead of instruments is the sport of horny teenagers.

But it doesn’t come. Instead, Arthur’s cheeks flush a delightful shade of crimson. He points a hard index finger at Eames and shouts,

“You were going to fuck her!”

Which is absolutely the funniest thing he could possibly have said.

Laughter, a little hysterical, a little relieved, bursts out of Eames. It’s absurd. The first and last woman he ever fucked was a bitchy redhead called Roseanne who taught him how to forge a woman as easily as if he had been born one.

“No, I wasn’t,” he says, still chuckling, because it’s  _funny,_ and so is Arthur’s scowl.

“Oh, you’re so full of crap,” Arthur snaps, and something about his sharp tone cuts Eames just a little too deep.

The laughter dies in his mouth. He waves his arms at the sky, begging the rain to fall if only to end this ludicrous argument.

“I wasn’t going to fuck her, Arthur! Jesus Christ,” he promises the gods of the clouds, but even as he says it, he hears Arthur’s tickly voice in his head from the cafe earlier,  _Just you, nobody else._

It rankles him, still, imagining how many people Arthur’s bedded on his jolly travels with Cobb, and image punches his next words out of him more harshly than he might otherwise have said them. With a low growl he asks,

“But really, so what if I was?”

Which is as farcical as Arthur suggesting it at all, because Eames hadn’t even noticed there was a  _particular_ woman for Arthur to get so uppity about.

Still, Arthur looks a little like he’s been slapped, and the knife of disappointment digs harder into the muscles of Eames’ stomach.

“Are you serious?” Arthur cries, sounding betrayed, the utter  _cheek_ of it. “I told y - I said-”

He’s flabbergasted, he’s upset, he’s actually surprised. It makes Eames laugh, makes him laugh a dark, sadistic sound that doesn’t taste right.

“I heard what you said,” he mutters bitterly. “And apparently you’ve been fucking whoever you please this whole time.”

Arthur looks shocked. His dark eyes widen and his mouth opens in a perfect, comical O, and he splutters around his response.

“Like you haven’t screwed anyone in two years, Eames,” he says, his voice dripping with accusation, or maybe that’s just the sweat down Eames’ back.

“I haven’t,” Eames snarls defensively, rankled by Arthur's distrust.

And Arthur, he laughs. He actually opens that perfect pink mouth of his and laughs.

Then he tilts his head with his eyebrows raised and that wry laugh still hanging in the air between them, as if all he can say is,  _Yes, you have._

It explodes inside Eames, the betrayal. The hurt and the anger, but most of all the fear.

All at once he can smell the damp of that basement, he can taste his own blood and the come slick skin of other men and he almost wretches, has to draw back away from Arthur to keep from throwing up on him.

“Oh, fuck you,” he thinks he whispers, and tears sting his eyes until he blinks them away and they roll like burning acid down his cheeks.

Arthur’s shaking his head, transformed. He looks horrified, looks guilty, looks terrified. He tries to speak but Eames cuts him off, breathless with the memory of that laugh in his head that suddenly sounds so much like somebody else’s, loud, pressed into his ear, burned into his skin.

“You cunt,” he says. “You absolute cunt.”

He hopes he can inject anger into it, hopes it doesn’t sound as weak as it feels. There’s a hand on his throat, dirty fingers in his mouth, nails biting into his tongue.

“That’s not what I meant,” Arthur says with such risible panic that it makes Eames laugh, because there’s quite literally nothing else he can do.

“Yes, it is,” he laughs and laughs and laughs, until he can’t anymore, until those three words pressing against his swollen brain tumble free from the constraints of his throat. “How dare you?”

Arthur’s silence is toxic in his throat, so he asks again.

“How can you - do you seriously think that counts?”

Arthur’s still shaking his head like a wet dog, face red and grey and orange and swirling. He’s physically shaking, but Eames thinks maybe he is, too.

“Of course I don’t, Eames,” Arthur insists. “You know I don’t.”

Does he, though? Eames isn’t so sure, can’t get that look on Arthur’s face out of his mind. He’s pretty sure he’s going to die thinking about that look.

His head is splitting open in a volcanic tremble of rage, he digs the palms of his hands into his eye sockets, up onto his forehead. He grips his hair and pulls and is half surprised when he doesn’t come apart at the seams.

Every inch of him screams, screams the words that escape him like an exorcism.

 _“They tied me down and fucked me until I was bleeding out!”_ he roars. Staggers weightless and heavy and opens his mouth to continue.  _“I was so drugged up, it was probably a waste of fucking zip ties!”_

Arthur grimaces. That head shake again, and he takes a step backwards away, like he’s afraid of being soiled by the very presence of Eames, like maybe Eames has disintegrated to the worms of a grave before his eyes.

“Eames, please,” he says, and Eames is so very done.

He’s waited and he’s watched and he’s tried. He’s done his Tai Chi and he’s jogged up a mountain and it’s all for nothing. There’s nothing left inside him except the filth left behind by those who knew what he was really worth, which Arthur is apparently only now realising.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he growls, staving another yell with every ounce of effort he can muster. “Is that too much for your delicate ears? Don’t fancy hearing about it, do you?”

Of course he doesn’t, Eames can see he doesn’t. Arthur’s face is ravaged with disgust and grief and he takes hold of his stomach like he wants to throw up, too.

“Eames, please stop,” he begs, like Eames hasn’t been begging the very same thing of Arthur for two years while Arthur gallivanted around the world without a thought for Eames.

Yes, Eames is completely done. He gives into the rage and like a forest fire obliterating the green, it washes out his grief and leaves only ashy vengeance.

“Why should I?” he bellows. “Why are you here, Arthur? For me to just magically wake up and spread wide for you again?”

The satisfaction he feels when Arthur flinches is incredibly weak, but he grabs it with both hands and clings tight, because the alternative is a dismay he won’t recover from.

“Of course not!” Arthur cries, trembling where he stands, tears streaking down his cheeks that have paled. “I want to help you but you won’t let me!”

 _Help him?_ Eames thinks darkly, thinks of Monaco and the sneer of surprise in Arthur’s voice as he muttered,  _So it’s true._ Why hadn’t he helped when Eames really needed it?

Why did he wait until Eames’ scars were half healed before tearing out the stitches and demanding he bleed all over again?

“Why should I?” he demands, feels hysteria clawing up his throat like a demon. “Go on, tell me. Explain to me why I should let you help me, Arthur.”

Arthur’s mouth wobbles and Eames doesn’t really want to hear it. He doesn’t want Arthur’s sadness, his guilt or his regret. He doesn’t want to be a regret on Arthur’s fix list, that wasn’t supposed to be how this happened.

Arthur mumbles something incoherent.

“What?” Eames snarls.

“I can’t!” Arthur shouts, trembling like a blaze.

“Can’t what? Explain? Or help?”

He wants to say more, but a sob takes hold of him that he barely manages to catch. Half of it rips out into the night anyway as Arthur replies,

“Both. I - both. I just - I want you to be ok.”

And isn’t that the most Arthur thing Eames has ever heard?

He grits his teeth, refuses to give in.

The night sky rolls with grey and violent. Down the street, a woman cackles and a car horn blares.

Eames smacks the tears out of his face with rough hands.

“Well I’m not,” he says, because really, there’s no blade whetted sharper than the truth. “You know I’m not.”

Arthur’s face crumples as he continues,

“I haven’t been ok for months, though, Arthur, so I don’t really get what’s changed, except you no longer have Dominick fucking Cobb to look after.”

It’s a double-edged sword, though. Eames swings it fast and hard and strong and guts himself in the process, because that’s the reality of the situation.

Arthur is here now, because he had more important things at the time. When Eames was grabbed by those animals, Arthur didn’t come looking for him, but it wasn’t because he decided not to. It was because he didn’t even realise Eames was gone.

Now though, Arthur’s got time to kill and Eames is his pet project, his afterthought in the emptiness following Dominick Cobb.

It’s this that Eames clings to when Arthur sobs into his palms like a tormented child, the wet sound of his cries echoing into his palms.

“Don’t,” Eames snarls. “You don’t get to cry, you hear me?”

He doesn’t want Arthur to cry, because if Arthur cries, Eames will lose control of his anger. It will take flight like birds and he’ll be left with that hollow hunger in his gut, that slice of him that Arthur claimed years ago.

“You’re not allowed to be kind, not after the state you left me in.”

 _(Don’t hurt him,_ Mallorie had asked of him, and Eames, he’s failing, failing so badly.)

“I’m sorry,” Arthur whimpers, whimpers it over and over and over again until the strings of Eames’ reins are cut away.

Arthur’s crying and Eames, he hates it, always has done.

Always will, he knows, the same way he knows he’s already forgiven Arthur, that this latent anger is something else entirely, he just has to hope Arthur will realise that. That he’ll open his eyes and see Eames isn’t trying to shove his head under the water, he’s just trying not to drown.

“Arthur,” he says gently, and Arthur skitters like a spooked horse.

“No!” he cries out, hands waving Eames away frantically. “I don’t need you to comfort me, Eames,  _Jesus._ I need you to hear me, ok?”

Arthur wipes away his tears and through the mist of tequila’s grip, Eames thinks he sees something else in Arthur’s eyes. Something tender, something Eames has coveted for years.

Eames can feel his own tears coming back, warming the chill that has covered him.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Arthur promises, and Eames, he doesn’t laugh, even though maybe he wants to. “I know you have no reason to believe me, but I’m staying right here. For as long as it takes.”

Eames feels the frown tug at his brow as Arthur looks at him so innocently.

“As long as what takes?” he asks.

Arthur gives him the tiniest, loveliest of smiles.

“For you to believe me,” he says.

Eames nods. He nods because there’s nothing else to do. Arthur’s looking at him so hopefully and Eames can’t bear it.

He closes his eyes and before him, that look on Arthur’s face, the one that says too much.

Then he glances across the street to see they have an audience. Paranoia trickles through him, and Arthur seems to feel the same.

Cautiously, they start to walk down the street, mindful of every step.

Arthur’s at least two feet away from him, but Eames is sure he can feel his heat, hear the thrum of his heartbeat, as if they have merged into one in the cloying air.

In the far distance, there’s a growl of thunder.

Arthur takes charge and Eames lets him. With the fight dissipating, Eames is exhausted. He drags his feet and almost stumbles twice. He wants to sink into the ground, wants to slide into a puddle and be splashed through, just to forget everything.

As he watches Arthur fumble for his key, he hears that laugh again.

 _That’s not what I meant,_ Arthur had said, but of course he did, didn’t he? He wouldn’t have done it otherwise, and Eames has seen the sidelong glances Arthur’s been giving him.

No wonder he hasn’t initiated talking about  _it._ What must he think of Eames?

Just as Arthur gets the key in the door, Eames grabs his arm instinctively.

Arthur turns his head quickly, as if surprised to find Eames has followed.

“What if I told you to leave?”

Arthur gives him a calculating look.

 _Well done, boy,_ Eames thinks to himself. He’s blown it again. Arthur will go and that will be that, because why wouldn’t he? Eames has just played his full hand, not a pair amongst the rubble of his cards. He’s shown just how little he has to offer Arthur, which was the exact opposite of what he’s spent the past weeks trying to mask.

Then Arthur opens his mouth and says,

“I’d say tough shit.”

And the bizarre thing is, he seems to mean it.

Something warm burns through Eames, falling out of him in a lifeless laugh.

“Ok,” he says, then again, just for good measure.

He wishes he had more. Wishes he hadn’t thrown it all away with his dignity and his hope.

But he doesn’t, and the sooner he accepts that, the happier he’ll be. He knows that now.

So Eames follows Arthur up to the flat, through the door into the hallway and a rush of gratitude surges through Eames. He needs to tell Arthur. Needs to say something now before it’s too late.

There’s a clock ticking somewhere and Eames feels the movement of its hands like a lifetime prisoner at the break of day. Mortality lurches out from under Eames, frail and follisome.

Arthur’s going to bed and Eames is struck by the unfathomable realisation he’s never going to see him again. Never going to touch his face, kiss his shoulders, feel his hands in his hair.

He wants to disappear, wants to fall into his room and never leave but before he can, Arthur says, “Eames?”

Eames blinks across at him, eyebrows raised.

Arthur’s looking at him with a curious expression.

“We can talk in the morning, yeah?” he asks, which is an odd thing to say, because Eames is fairly certain they won’t. His guts churn as he nods and it feels like a lie, though he isn’t sure why.

Arthur turns away and Eames can’t let this be it, can’t not touch him once more, this clueless creature that Eames knows fiercely, loves desperately, even if maybe he can never tell him.

“Arthur,” he murmurs and Arthur, he turns, quietude without quarrel.

Eames grabs him with both hands, holds the shape of him in his arms one last time, smells the sour of his sweat and feels the humming of his heart.

“Thank you,” he whispers, tracing the words over Arthur's throat with his lips, as intimately as he dares.

Arthur doesn't say anything, which is probably for the best.

Eames scurries into his room as quickly as he can, and moments later hears the snicker of Arthur's door shutting, too.

His bedroom is dark, smells of rain and cardamom and solitude.

He sits slowly on his bed and starts stripping his clothes, letting them flutter to the floor.

Resolve feels good, alien, soothing. He doesn't quite know what exactly has taken hold, only that he feels very brave, which he hasn't felt in forever. The tears have dried up. He thinks that maybe he’s run out of them.

He imagines Arthur sleeping behind the far wall. Stares at it, as if it might turn to glass if only he waits long enough.

He looks down to see the bedside cabinet open and in his hand a knife, a long blade. It's cold in his clammy palm. He breathes heavily, can taste the promise of forgetfulness like rosemary and chives.

Through his open window, a cold draft blasts, bringing with it a scatter of wet. The rain has started.

Eames smiles, reaches under the bed and tugs out the two crinkling bags of fat pills, each a little more than half full. His mouth dries in anticipation.

The only light that spills through is as faint as the rain, but he doesn't need to see more than shadows, not for this.

Without realising, he's practiced this routine in his head a hundred times already, mid-pose in the square of Sacsayhuamán with his eyes on Arthur's ass, awake in the small hours of grey predawn, standing under the spray of the shower.

He's ready now. He's heard Arthur's hatred, heard his disappointment and his regret and he knows, now. Knows everything he needs to.

And maybe, maybe he owes Arthur better, but owes himself, too. Owes himself a rest, a real one. He's needed one forever.

He thinks maybe he hasn't slept since the day Emmeline left.

The dry bitterness of the pills gip his throat. He sinks and soars and the covers, heavy and hot, soak him up like he's melted into them.

His hand hurts, deep to the bone and there’s red on the pillow. He can smell metal and rainwater and the faint butterfly kiss of Arthur tucked against him, ghostly and warm.

He feels peaceful, feels ready.

 _We can talk in the morning,_ he hears Arthur murmur, full of hopeful promise, in the same jagged voice he once said,  _It seems you're a public menace, Mr Eames._

Eames presses his face into the pillow. Smells granite and copper and oil.

Exhaustion claims him like a curse and slowly, warmly, he sinks into the lullaby grip of the abyss.

.

.

When he wakes up, Arthur is there.

Which, really, shouldn’t be as much of a surprise as it is.

.

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All suffering originates from craving, from attachment, from desire. ~ Edgar Allen Poe
> 
> Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus
> 
> You shall love, whether you like it or not. ~ Terrence Malick, To The Wonder
> 
> Was your work of art so heavy that it would not let you live? ~ Patrick Wolf, The Sun Is Often Out


	3. PART THREE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You can sleep in the car,” Arthur promises him with a tight smile.
> 
> “Yes I bloody well can,” Eames grumbles, taking the second gun Arthur hands him despite the weak shake in his fingers. “I’ll follow.”
> 
> The words jab Arthur, warm and deep, like worrisome fingers in an old scar. He nearly smiles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> KIDS, SERIOUSLY, YOU’RE ALL WONDERFUL. And I apologise for how slow I am at updating things. I’d try make promises to get better, but I’m a pretty consistently busy human, so that seems silly.
> 
> Thanks so very bloody much. IAmANonnieMouse, HappySeaNinja, icarusinflight, FreightTrainInMyBrain, ladylolabean, your guys’ comments made me blush a lot, you are all very kind.
> 
> So, a couple of warnings. There’s very brief reference or two to a future Major Character Death here. However, I’m assuming if you’re reading this, you’ve read all the other stories in this series and therefore it’s not exactly going to come as a shock. Also it isn’t hugely explicit.
> 
> And once again, we are discussingdepression, suicidal thoughts/actions and rape/assault (aftermath), so please be aware if you’re easily disturbed or triggered. 
> 
> Thanks a million. You’re all super. I hope you like it. (Also heads up, Transient is on its way.)
> 
> Always yours, 
> 
> LRCx

.

.

Later, much later, they will be able to say:

There was that time, a lifetime of dreams ago, when Arthur kidnapped Eames from a hospital in South America.

There was that time, a lifetime of dreams ago, when Arthur possibly killed a man who didn’t deserve it.

.

.

It happens like this. Exactly like this.

.

.

It’s night-time. The time for ghosts and regrets.

Arthur’s not sure how long he sits in the uncomfortable plastic chair in the uncomfortable plastic room for. The bed is small and the window is frosted over; the light that bleeds in is white and cold, stars and electricity.

He shouldn’t be here at all, slipped inside on the third shift rotation, with the help of a reluctant nurse after he offered her a handful of weak promises and another of nuevo sol.

He sits in his chair, pelvis turned to stone with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped in heathen prayer, thumbs tucked delicately under his chin.

His eyelids have been rubbed red and he’s wearing a heavy coat over clothes he slept in and his chest is tight. He stares at the patient, at his golden-brown hair and his sallow skin.

Eames looks very thin under the blankets, encased in tubes. The throbbing beat of the machine, his chest rising and falling.

Arthur blinks sparingly, feels the steel threads in his muscles stiffening.

.

.

“Don’t die,” he whispers quietly, just the once. “Wake up.”

.

.

_(Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality.)_

.

.

Arthur doesn’t call Cobb.

It seems cruel, it  _would be_ cruel, because Cobb didn’t call him when Mal  _nearly_ offed herself.

Didn’t call until he was at the police station about to give a statement that would ultimately prove ineffectual against the might of his dead wife’s cunning resourcefulness.

(And anyway, it’s selfish to think of Eames that way, because what Mr and Mrs Cobb had was real, was legitimate, they were married with two children while Eames and Arthur, well, what they have wouldn’t fit on a matchbox.)

So Arthur, he doesn’t call Cobb.

Which means he doesn’t call anyone, because Arthur has favours coming out of his ears, yet friends have always been in short supply. The only person Arthur would consider calling, of course, is already here.

Within reach of his hand, so very far across the no man’s land of the hospital sheets.

.

.

“He will sleep for a long time yet,” the nurse tells him when she comes back, wearing that same grimace of distrust as before.

Her face is grizzled with the gruelling pain of her work, her black hair streaked with silver and her mouth in a permanent scowl of disapproval. She checks Eames’ vitals in a dispassionate, efficient manner that Arthur appreciates in medical staff.

 _There’s nothing worse than a sentimental doctor,_ someone told him once. A medical student at college that was probably trying to justify his own detachment. All the same, the thought stuck.

The nurse has either been told about Arthur or was privy to his indiscretion upon his arrival with the ambulance.

She looks at him like he is a germ on her apron.

(He feels it keenly, though he does not flinch.)

“He needs rest,” she says, which means  _go away,_ but whether she heard about it from a colleague or saw it herself, she apparently knows Arthur isn’t going anywhere. The money must be enough to keep her lips closed, even if the promises aren’t, because nobody’s come looking for him yet.

“Is his life still in danger?” he asks, a croak of broken vowels.

He can still taste the death of Eames’ skin inside his lips.

“Perhaps, with a friend like you,” the nurse says haughtily.

Arthur accepts the criticism without comment.

She sees what must be a terrible photograph snap of them both. She sees a convulsing, shapeless curl of spider limbs, ungrateful of the life he’s been given. She sees a menace with a shotgun pressed into a doctor’s jaw, threatening angelic wrath should his charge fall.

“Will he live?” he asks coldly.

The nurse purses her lips while she works, her dark eyes sliding over him where he sits.

It seems she has no answer, because she finishes up and stalks to the door on quick feet. He hears her stop in the doorway, the snort of her breath.

Feels the weight of her stare on the back of his head.

“This time,” she says.

It sounds closer to a warning than anything.

Arthur tries to forget.

(It lingers anyway.)

.

.

It happens like this, exactly like this.

.

.

Arthur isn’t proud of the measures he takes to ensure Eames’ survival.

While he is hardly a peaceable man, he knows that compared to Eames’ earliest induction into the criminal underworld he’s been borderline sheltered.

He doubts Eames would spare more than a passing thought over actually holding a gun to a doctor’s face and telling him in broken, ill conjugated Spanish exactly what will happen if his patient dies.

(Actually, Eames would probably be more concerned about the bad Spanish than the look of terror in the doctor’s eyes.)

“Salir, salir!” a young nurse shouts, unmoved by the gun in the intruder’s hand as she pushes him from the entry.

Over her shoulder, Eames is being blocked by four orderlies who are loud and large and Arthur  _can’t see Eames anymore._

His heart is swollen with adrenaline and his lungs are clamped so tight, he can feel his knees buckling and sweat sheeting his back.

“Salir!” the nurse says again, her hands full of hatred and her eyes full of sympathy

The door smacks shut in Arthur’s face and he hits the ground hard, the gun still in his hand.

.

.

 _I think I’m a little bit in love with you,_ he had said, when Arthur was too closely guarded by his bristling temper to let fly the trappings of his own heart.

.

.

“Get up now, get up,” a voice says, accented, powerful.

There’s a gruffness to it that reminds Arthur of Cobb but when he looks up, he sees a much older man.

His black hair is long, hanging in curtains around his face and speckled with fine tracings of silver. There are tattoos on his hands, Arthur stares at them as he’s pulled to his feet.

The stranger is lined with weariness, rough with impatience.

“It’s time to go, friend,” he says with a wry look. His hands pinch tight at Arthur’s shoulders, pulling him with a hidden strength up and out towards the door.

“No, I can’t, he -” Arthur scrambles, even as a hand clamps over his grasp on the gun, tugging it between them to hide it from view.

“Yes,” the stranger hisses.

Arthur stumbles, he can feel his kneecaps loosening, his ankles weakening. He stretches towards the swinging doors, where the muted shouting is authoritative and furious.

He wrenches himself in the stranger’s arms, even as he’s dragged on sliding feet away.

“Come now,” the man snaps, before calling something in quick Spanish to their left, where three orderlies are approaching with nervous looks of concern.

“I can’t,” Arthur rasps, but his feet take a step backwards anyway.

“Yes, you can,” the older man says.

The air behind them, cooler. An open door and a morning breeze. Early grey, like an aging sea.

Outside, voices, the shriek of birds and the clamouring of cars on the streets beyond. Arthur’s stomach is rolling and those hands on his shoulders are bone deep. His weight sinks into them, a jab of despair where his heart used to be.

The stranger’s face, lined with troubles that are not Arthur’s. Grey with an age Arthur hasn’t reached yet, and maybe he never will.

His eyes, brown, not kind but perhaps understanding. Knowledgeable.

“This way,” he says and Arthur wonders if he should take the safety off his gun. Kindness often feels uncommon in the world Arthur inhabits.

Then again, he’s not sure he’s in his world right now. This feels unfamiliar, all of it. Perhaps he has so briefly stepped into that other place, that other world where kindness is currency and the words people speak can be believed; the one he left when he was twenty-one years old.

He looks down.

There’s drying blood on his hands, great smears of it. Eames’ blood.

 _Eames,_ inside, inside that place behind him. Behind those doors, surrounded by strangers, alone, strangers who don’t know him, don’t know how important it is that he lives.

Arthur can feel his insides breaking, splitting and cracking. Eames’ cold skin and Eames’ blue mouth and the look on Eames’ face when Arthur laughed at him for his honesty.

 _Do you seriously think that counts?_ he’d asked, and Arthur had said no but maybe it doesn’t matter what Arthur thinks, only what Eames thinks, only what Eames knows.

And Eames, he knows something false and terrible, knows that Arthur looked him in the eye and accused him of cheating for getting by raped by a madman and his thugs. It’s wrong, it’s wrong and awful and none of that matters because if it’s what Eames believes, then Arthur has failed. He’s failed again.

Now here he stands outside a hospital emergency entrance with a stranger holding him upright as he shakes violently, his eyes blank and itching dry. A stranger with coffee clean eyes and a crucifix tattooed on his neck who says,

“They don’t want more trouble. Just keep quiet. Here, walk now.”

The street is loud, empty. They’re standing in an ambulance bay, on cracked wet concrete. Further into the cul-de-sac, two dark haired men wearing blue uniforms share a cigarette. They glance over their shoulders at them and Arthur, shrinking into his torso with his bloodied hands and his clammy face, stuffs the gun into his jacket pocket.

The man’s hands on his shoulders, lighter and calmer, coaxing him away.

And he goes. Or, he stumbles.

He’s not sure if he has socks on inside his shoes, and at this thought a laugh tumbles out of him, wet and hysterical.

The man turns to him, fixing him with a bemused, wary look as they walk slowly down the sidewalk.

“I’m Gabriel,” he introduces, which is probably true.

“Nathan,” Arthur says automatically, which is odd, because he hasn’t really thought about him in years.

Gabriel nods.

The air is thick with humidity and old rain. There’s sweat on their foreheads already, slow trickles down their pulsing temples.

When they reach the open mouth of the street’s end, to the widening of the city where the cars hum in the early gloom and the sky is almost lighter than the streetlamps, Arthur pauses. He turns to stare back at the hospital.

It seems unendurably formidable, seems no place to leave a person alone. Arthur’s stomach convulses again.

“Is he a fighter?” Gabriel asks beside him.

“What?” Arthur returns his gaze to the older man’s questioning expression.

“Your friend,” he says sternly. “Is he a fighter?”

Arthur looks back down at his bloody hands, gives an imperceptible nod.

The Eames in his mind is a sleeping cat, a pillow of colourful warmth and the slice of a lemon splashing in an icy drink.

But he’s also the blade secreted into an artery, the swell of a fist and three days awake in a snowstorm. He’s  _The English Knife_ and he’s a jaguar in a jungle and he’s so much more important than Arthur will probably ever be comfortable admitting.

“Yes,” he says hoarsely.

A hand claps the back of his head, making him flinch. It’s a fatherly gesture, one that doesn’t compute with this stranger, one that doesn’t even fit with his own father, who was never that kind of father, never really anyone’s kind of father. He looks up at Gabriel’s furrowed brow, his flat mouth.

“Then you do him a disservice, losing faith now,” Gabriel says in a hard voice.

Despair is still ringing in his ears as Arthur nods again, another tiny jerk of his head.

 _(I just thought you were going to find me,_ Eames said in Bangkok.)

Arthur presses his thumbs into his eye sockets, feels them burn with tears that won’t come.

 _This time,_ he thinks quietly, his gun heavy in his pocket and guilt weighing in his chest like three walls of Pandora’s Box.

The clocks twist and the sky moves, time stretching elastic into the day as they walk quietly through the trickle-fill streets of a sleepy sad Cusco while Arthur, he waits.

.

.

(The irony does not go unnoticed.)

.

.

_(I should tell I blew the candle out, just to get back in.)_

.

.

Arthur’s mother died on a Wednesday.

She had no reason to be on the road that morning, no plans or appointments or errands, which means her death was pointless.

Her ribcage was crushed and her skull cracked and both legs shattered, which means her death was painful.

The doctor tells Arthur’s father that she was still alive when the emergency services reached her, but by the time they’d cut her out of the fiery scrunch of what was once a car, she was gone.

Arthur wasn’t supposed to hear that part.

But he did, and for years he was plagued with dreams of his mother’s final screaming breaths.

The labour of them, the mulch of her bones inside her, the leak of dark blood out of her ears and nose as her consciousness wavered.

When she’s sixteen, Arthur’s little sister crashes her car after skidding on black ice, and their father is so afraid he slaps her when she gets home.

She runs straight to her big brother’s bedroom full of sobs and he lets her cry into his chest while he re-reads his history of mercantilism essay over her shoulder.

Once she’s calm again, he tells her exactly how stupid she’d been for not being more careful, and didn’t she  _realise_ how dangerous it is to drive in winter?

It’s one of the last times they speak before Arthur meets a man called Dominick Cobb.

.

.

 _For once in your life will you just shut the fuck up?_ he demanded once, which was so stupid, because once that voice is gone it doesn’t come back, and he misses it like a black hole in the chasm of his heart.

.

.

Before that, though, there is Cusco. There is the club with the neon grime and the shouting in the almost rain and the bag of white pills and Arthur’s screams stripping the paint from the walls.

There is the detective, whom Arthur will shoot in an act that might be considered savage.

.

.

The detective’s name is Medina.

He’s wiry, with streaks of russet beard along his diamond cutter’s jaw and eyes creased with naive concern.

He’s young, younger than Arthur and maybe that’s what does it, or maybe it’s something else.

Whatever it is, when young Detective Medina walks into Eames’ hospital room and finds a wretchedly exhausted man who matches the description of the maniac who shoved a gun in a doctor’s face yesterday, he just folds his arms and says,

“You Americans and your guns.”

Arthur masks his flinch with a demonstrative yawn that’s probably overkill.

The detective pulls up a horrid plastic chair of his own, perches elegantly on it, his hands clasped with his forearms on his knees. It might be a mockery of Arthur’s pose, or it might be sympathy.

Arthur stares at him with only a trace of concern.

“Am I being arrested?” he asks.

The detective cocks his head with catlike curiosity and a trickle of a smile. There’s a pair of aviators on his head and a thin silver chain around his neck, tucked under his light blue collar.

“Not yet,” he replies. “Now tell me, what are you doing in Peru?”

.

.

When Eames opens his eyes in the regional hospital in Cusco, the clocks are quiet and Arthur’s fighting sleep as it creeps over him inch by draining inch.

Night-time again, clock click quiet. The stench of police on him, the painted guilt of the accused set free.

He startles at that slice of blue, flinches upwards like the jerk of marionette strings.

Arthur leans into the bed, one hand on the mattress, close enough for Eames to take it if he wants.

He doesn’t.

Instead he blinks slowly, eyes opening a little wider this time.

His mouth is still stained black, the powdery death mark of charcoal that they forced down his throat. He can obviously still taste it, too, judging by the way his tongue swipes over his dirtied teeth, the grimace that follows.

He stares at Arthur’s face with such quietude, it makes him shift in his seat.

“Hello,” Arthur says, cat paw soft, testing the weight of a high branch.

Eames blinks in return, a crease dimpling his brow.

“We’re at the hospital,” Arthur continues a little helplessly. He wonders if he should call a nurse or a doctor.

(He knows he should, knows he must. He doesn’t want to, though, because then he’ll have to leave.)

Eames looks thoughtful, enervated. He looks sad.

Arthur is struck by the very real possibility that Eames will be angry with him.

Eames, who’s been dealing with the fallout of all of these things so vastly out of his control. Hell, even  _Cusco_ had been Arthur’s decision.

He’d taken Eames out of Thailand, where he’d chosen to go to  _alone,_ and had dragged him to South America during the wet season. Shouldn’t he at least have had the courtesy to take him to Africa instead?

Eames’ eyelids are red, his lips black and his skin bloodless.

“If you want me to go…” Arthur chokes out. God, he hopes he doesn’t. “Well, technically they’ve banned me from being here at all. But one of the nurses let me in. Actually, I bribed her. But also, she didn’t want you to be alone, so there's that.”

He’s rambling. He can hear himself twittering like a goddamn spring bird.

A corner of Eames’ mouth twitches upwards. He swallows painfully, eyes clenching shut briefly and when they open again, they immediately zero in on Arthur’s face, far more clearly than before.

“Foul play, darling,” Eames croaks, barely more than a whisper.

Arthur feels his lungs contract tightly, a sharp injection of relief and misery that immediately fills his tired, itchy eyes with hot, salty tears that don’t fall, instead leave a wet glaze over everything he looks at. His breath rattles out of him in a shudder and he hides into his collarbones, his head bowing in shame.

Before he can withdraw his hand from the bed, though, Eames takes it.

The thick bandages and splints over his palm and fingers make him clunky, but the intent is there. Arthur freezes. Through the smudgy filter of his tears, that quirk of half a smile.

 _I don’t approve,_ it says,  _but I forgive you._

As if forcefully shoving Eames back into his reluctant mortal coil can be equated with stealing a kiss from a lovely, clever Architect on the second level of an astonishingly difficult job.

Without thinking, Arthur leans down to kiss Eames’ bare forearm, the skin cracked dry.

When he looks up, Eames’ eyes are closed again. His smile has disappeared into the slack of sleep.

It was there, though. It was real.

Arthur saw it. Felt its warmth like the sun through a pane of frosted glass.

.

.

_I was so drugged up, it was probably a waste of fucking zip ties._

He had hurled it like a weapon and when Arthur replays it again in his head, crackling static in his mind and a measly cup of coffee in his hand, as he stands in the apartment that evening, he really hears it. Hears it properly, the truth of it.

More than the  _drugged up_ and more than the  _zip ties._

He tries to remember what contacts Eames has in Russia that must have helped him when he escaped.

Eames, who is so prone to addiction he can’t even commit to just the one. Who couldn’t possibly have shaken the effects of those drugs all by himself, not without going insane, and isn’t  _that_ just yet another thing Arthur very much doesn’t want to think about right now.

.

.

And so, standing in the kitchen of a tiny apartment in Cusco, while Eames sleeps in a hospital bed and the night drones on in a flurry of stars and storms, Arthur wonders, for the very first time,  _How the fuck did he get to Monaco at all?_

.

.

This oversight will trouble him in the long hours, in two years’ time, when Eames is ash and all the questions that he never asked are fated to remain unanswered.

.

.

_What are you doing in Peru?_

I’m not here to cause trouble.

_I didn’t ask what you weren’t doing._

He’ll be awake soon, and we’ll be gone.

_We’ll see about that._

.

.

Arthur finally returns to the apartment for the first time the evening after Eames wakes up.

Eames’ bedroom smells of rain and rot. The bed is filthy with stains. There’s a splatter of sick on the floor that Arthur thinks might actually have been him, he can’t remember, can’t remember anything anymore. Just the way his heart had shrunk to a speck of ice as he pulled back those covers.

The window is still wide open, the bitter chill of the wind gnaws at him but he daren’t close it.

There’s nothing to be done except pile all the sheets and blankets into trash bags, which he can later dispose of in a skip and set of fire, then douse the mattress and surrounding floor in bleach that stings his eyes and prickles his skin.

Arthur does the same with his own bed, just for good measure, and starts packing all their necessities into one black shoulder carrier.

What remains, he adds to the trash bags.

Then he stands in the shower as it soaks him through, hot and cold and sputtering.

He runs his soapy nails over his skin with one hand, the other clenched tight in a fist around his totem as he washes.

Its weight is horribly truthful. It grounds him with a pit of unlucky familiarity in his stomach and it’s good, of course, but maybe finding out he was trapped in someone else’s fucked up subconscious would have been better. Easier, at least.

(Five years later, he’ll do the same again, only his knees will be bruised on the wet tiles as he screams into the water, hoping to drown. Not yet, though.)

He washes off the sinful crud of the past, unpeeling his skin of the memory of how cold Eames had been in that rotten bed. His heart beats on wearily, his eyes blink and his mouth twists around practiced apologies.

Then he gets dressed in a pair of dark jeans and one of Eames’ shirts, slips on the tan jacket still on the back of the kitchen chair where he left it in panic.

Picks up his bag and heads to the hospital with his gun in his holster and their passports in his pocket.

.

.

 _What exactly do you want from me?_ Eames will ask as he stares at Arthur’s packed bag.

It isn’t the first time he’s asked that.

.

.

Five months after Mal jumps out of a window, Arthur checks into a hotel in Tunis.

Eames is on a job, which Arthur only knows for sure because his contact in Cairo assured him the relics had been moved there by land after the Antiquities Museum heist.

They aren’t exactly priceless, so it’s his best chance of not getting kicked out by Eames under the pretence of being too busy, which is what happened in Canberra.

(And Munich, but he’s not ready to remember that one yet. At least Canberra was just unpleasant, and at least the arguments didn’t happen until _after_ the blowjobs.)

He briefly considers feeling guilty about hacking Eames’ emails, but in fairness, if Eames hadn’t wanted Arthur to hack his emails, he should have made it a bit trickier. Arthur has all but made friends with every firewall he’s ever come across.

So he checks in on a Monday afternoon, having flown directly there following the debrief of a job with Cobb and a slightly too green Architect called Nash, whom Arthur isn’t entirely sure he wants to work with again.

He’s staying in the room next to Eames’, which is empty when Arthur breaks in.

There’s a pilot jacket on the bed and a suitcase under the window full of badly folded shirts and trousers.

On a whim, Arthur unpacks the suitcase and hangs the clothes in the wardrobe.

There’s a packet of cigarettes in a side pocket, with a folded-up sketch of a woman’s face inside.

It’s a soft edged portrait, half done and finished later, judging by the different pencil tones. She’s not detailed enough to be a mark, is probably a woman from the journey out of Cairo.

Arthur hastily refolds it, stuffing it back into the cigarette pack and dropping it on the bedside cabinet.

He briefly considers staying in the room until Eames gets back but given how ill-received he’s been these past few months, there’s no guarantee Eames won’t shoot him on sight.

Probably not anywhere important, though he wouldn’t put it past Eames to dish out a spiteful flesh wound.

So instead, Arthur retreats to his own room for a few hours, then heads down to the hotel bar to wait, his eyes on the entry.

Eames doesn’t arrive, though.

Arthur gets through three glasses of red wine before giving in.

He drags his sullen feet, feeling remarkably foolish. Eames is probably tailing a mark or arranging a drop off. Or maybe he’s already been paid and is out celebrating.

The thought makes Arthur feel shamefully queasy.

He stands outside Eames’ hotel room door for several minutes, glowering at the number 712 with dark anger.

Dejected, he returns to his room.

Everything is exactly as he left it, but for a piece of paper laid out on the desk.

It’s creased, a little torn at one edge.

The woman, her tucked smile and hooded eyes, the wisps of hair on her forehead.

Arthur picks it up. Overleaf, there’s now a second drawing, all in one shade.

It’s of him in profile, sitting at the downstairs bar.

His neck is a little bowed, his face downturned. He feels somewhat offended by the tilted expression of anxiety worn by this pencil version of himself. The look of deflation in his shoulders.

He’s not sure if it’s a truthful depiction, or if Eames is trying to tell him something.

For a moment he considers crunching it into a ball. It would probably make him feel much better in the short term.

He doesn’t. Instead he folds it back up, drops it on the desk and leaves the room, the nerves in his spine frozen.

Eames answers on the seventeenth knock.

He’s wearing sweatpants and a tank shirt, and the shock of tattoos on display momentarily snags Arthur’s tongue.

Silently, grumpily, Eames steps aside, waving him in with an open palm.

The first thing Arthur sees is the suitcase under the window, full of badly folded shirts once more.

Arthur scoffs loudly.

“You’re despicable,” he says, and it’s supposed to be teasing, supposed to be an olive branch but when he turns Eames is wearing a pinched, defensive expression. “Eames,” he says tiredly.

Eames’ arms are crossed over his chest. His jaw is clenched; his eyes are creased at the corners.

The bed covers are rumpled, pulled back.

Arthur stares at them too long, blushes and returns to looking at Eames’ disapproving face.

“How much did you get?” Arthur asks.

Eames rolls his eyes. When he speaks, his voice is riddled with poison.

“Enough,” he replies tersely.

His expectant half scowl is unyielding.

Arthur nods, and despite his monumental effort he finds himself dropping his gaze.

The hotel room is lit only by one bulb, fixed to the wall above the pillows. They are cast in weak yellow. The room feels smaller than it did when Arthur broke in earlier.

Has Eames always taken up so much space?

“So, Cobb’s -”

“I really don’t care,” Eames snaps.

When Arthur looks up, it’s to see a mannequin’s sneer of a smile plastered on his face.

Eames shakes his head with a chuff of laughter. He rocks on his feet and the air between them seems to rock, too. A tide pushes and pulls them, they are unanchored, drifting closer and further and Arthur feels like maybe he’s forgotten how to swim.

He thinks about Cobb back in Darkhan, the suspicious bark in his voice,  _What kind of errands?_

Eames moves with visibly aimless frustration.

He scrubs a palm over his face, down his utterly kissable throat and no, that’s not what is happening here.

Arthur squirms where he stands and Eames must notice, because he bites his lower lip against the wavering of a smile. A taunting, mean look.

One that sits well among the wolves.

Arthur thinks maybe he is never in more danger than in moments like this, when he is alone with a man who does not share his respect for human life, and who possibly loves him more than Arthur loves him back.

“What exactly do you want from me?” Eames asks, and for all he sneers it, he sounds bone tired.

Arthur shrugs one shoulder with deliberate obtuseness, just to watch Eames’ lip curl over his teeth.

Heaving a great sigh, Eames returns to his bed, crawling up the covers to lie sprawled on his front.

His shirt has ridden up just far enough to reveal a strip of dark tan at his lower back.

“I’m not chasing after you all over the world, Arthur,” Eames warns him, his sleepy voice muffled by the pillow his face is buried into.

Grinning, Arthur undoes his shirt and belt, leaving his tie on as he crawls over those spread limbs. He kisses the stripe of exposed skin briefly, nosing up until his mouth is at Eames’ neck and he’s straddling the back of one of his thighs.

“I think you’ll find  _I’ve_ been chasing  _you_ these past five months,” he says, tonguing letters into the nape of Eames’ neck.

Eames writhes pleasantly, shifting them more comfortably and rocking his ass back teasingly.

Despite this, though, they barely get Arthur out of his clothes before sleep falls heavier than the sheets over them.

Arthur drifts with his face tucked into a tattoo and his hands tightly gripping onto one of Eames’ hips.

“I’ll wake you up with a blowjob in the morning, yeah?” Eames mutters, half asleep. A promise he will, in fact, make good on, much to Arthur’s delight the following morning.

Before that, though, in the drifting, currentless tide of dreamlessness, Arthur hears the coal dark rumble of Eames’ voice.

“Just tell me what you want,” Eames says, as if it’s that easy. As if Arthur could possibly quantify or qualify the myriad kaleidoscope of  _want_ that Eames evokes in him.

As if Arthur could possibly know the answer to that.

.

.

In the beginning, Eames is the one to break first.

Eames ticks a lot of British stereotype boxes that Arthur has in his preconceptions, but not one of the biggest.

 _(They’re all very hush-hush about that stuff over there,_ Sandy Carmichael had said, and he had believed her.)

Eames probably doesn’t know the meaning of prudish, or chaste. He could make tongue gestures into an Olympic category and he eats ice cream like he’s auditioning for a porno.

So really, Arthur’s foolish to be surprised when Eames catches him off guard as they pack down after the debrief of a slick corporate job for a philandering ambassador’s business partner.

They’re the last to leave the suite, the Extractor having departed with tooth clicking impatience as soon as Arthur stopped talking.

Arthur’s buckling down his satchel when a confident, dancing voice announces,

“We should have sex.”

Arthur’s very glad he’s not looking at Eames, because he feels the shock on his face like a splash of cold water.

The last time somebody propositioned him so directly he was a sophomore at college, at a party he’d been dragged to by his needy roommate.

“Should we?” he asks several seconds too late to be considered  _casual,_ as if he hasn’t engaged in sexual warfare with the Forger for the last three jobs, leaving him so viciously horny he once actually went out to a bar to pick up the first woman who looked as unEameslike as possible.

“Don’t tell me you’ve not thought about it,” Eames teases.

He’s closer now. Arthur can see his shadow, feel his presence like a fog of heat.

He pulls his bag over his shoulder and turns around.

Never mind closer, Eames is  _right there._ All coarse skin and bronze eyelashes and pink mouth.

His shirt collar’s wonky, probably on purpose because he’s an asshole, and he licks his lips with a darting tongue.

“Of course I have,” Arthur replies, impassive, staring at Eames’ mouth until it curls into a smirk.

“And?” Eames asks, dragging the  _A_ along rough ground the way he does with Arthur’s name when he’s being particularly pedantic.

Arthur closes most of the gap between them. Eames smells of cherries and soap. He leans in even closer, until their faces risk touching.

“Are you as talkative in bed as you are the rest of the time?” Arthur asks, tilting his head.

(It’s a quite genuine concern. Eames never shuts up when he can help it.)

Arthur expects Eames to laugh, or perhaps to pull away, teasingly offended. He doesn’t.

Instead, Eames licks his lips again, and for the barest trace of time Arthur feels his tongue skim over his own mouth.

“You’d love it,” Eames says quietly, a triple dare with cream on top.

Then he turns around on his heel and strolls calmly out of the door.

Arthur lets out the breath he’s been holding in his chest. His fingernails are dug painfully into his palms and he’s not entirely sure at what point he got so hard inside his suddenly very tight pants, but by  _God_ is he there now. His cheeks feel hot, as does his neck and chest.

He thinks about that brush of wet muscle over his lower lip all the way to the airport, where he sits at a bar for two hours drinking soda lime and waiting.

.

.

Arthur doesn’t find out Eames’ bedroom habits the first time, because the first time isn’t in a bedroom.

.

.

(The second time isn’t, either.)

.

.

 _I don’t need you,_ he says, and he really, truly means it.

.

.

_(But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?)_

.

.

Medina’s there, outside the hospital.

There’s a gun at his hip and a badge in his hand and he says,

“American, we need to talk.”

Arthur stands very still. The rain above them whistles, wets their hair and faces where they stand.

“The doctor is not pressing charges,” he says, which quite frankly is the last thing on Arthur’s mind.

He already has two tickets booked out of Lima next week. It’ll take a day or so to drive, but he has a car that this detective probably doesn’t know about. All he needs is to wait for Eames to keep more than a few mouthfuls of food down, and they’ll be gone.

“Oh, good,” Arthur says anyway.

Detective Medina, leaning against his car with one hand on his ratty beard, wearing his badge on a lanyard today, so it glints with all the pomp he clearly enjoys against his chest.

Maybe he thinks the beard makes him look older. Arthur wonders if anyone will have the heart to tell him it makes him look even more like a teenager.

“I need you to make a statement, Mr Penzak,” Medina says.

Arthur offers his most accommodating smile, the back of his neck prickling.

“I’m afraid you’re quite mistaken, sir,” he replies coolly.

Medina laughs. It’s a surprisingly warm sound, and he looks even younger when his eyes fold up around his excitement.

He’s squirrelly today, unlike last night. He knows he’s caught bigger game than he was originally assigned to. He knows, somehow, _somefuckinghow,_ about Penzak and that means he’s probably found -

“I paid Mr Tessaro a visit already,” the detective assures him, thrumming smug as a hummingbird in spring.

Arthur maintains his smile, but it’s a near thing as nerves quake.

“I don’t know a Mr Tessaro, I’m afraid,” he replies with tentative defiance.

Medina pulls a mocking expression, too gleeful to really even pretend to be surprise.

“No? Then I suppose it means nothing to you that he’s being charged with possession of contraband substances.”

Arthur doesn’t think he flinches, but it’s hard to be sure.

Medina looks so pleased with himself. He’s vibrating with hidden energy that seeps out of him and into Arthur like toxic waste, sluggishly twisting his insides.

Before he can decide what to say, an ambulance swerves past, blaring and shrieking and full of real plasma pain that drags Arthur back to that word over and over down the phone, his hand on an airless, tattooed chest.

Medina stands upright, leans forward with that cocky grin so his lanyard swings between them tauntingly and says,

“Next time you bleach your apartment into nonexistence, you might want to set it on fire, too. It is, I think, harder to prove the culprit of an arson attack than it is possession of drugs, or an assault on a medical professional.”

Ice chips slick and stick down Arthur’s throat. He keeps his arms loose by his sides and his face solemn as he watches the detective get in his car and drive away.

The rain splashes shy in the air overhead. The clouds are heavy and so is Arthur’s sense of panic.

He bites hard into his cheeks, tasting blood and frustration.

Cautiously, he walks through the front entrance to the hospital.

It’s busy, smells of antiseptic and cold plastic.

Nobody glances at him, dressed in a plain suit that is feasibly somewhere between doctor and visitor. He walks at a leisurely pace, despite his quickening heart.

.

.

In his pocket, two passports. Their stamps barely dry.

One for Joshua Penzak, the other for Ellis Tessaro.

.

.

“I know men like you,” Gabriel said as they cradled cups of coffee and discussed the older man’s daughter, and the broken leg her husband’s getting fixed up as they speak. “I was a man like you.”

“What man is that?” Arthur asked, salt sour wary with a burnt tongue.

“A hungry one,” Gabriel replied. “Hungry for the things you are not allowed to have.”

.

.

Later, Arthur will think on what it is he hungers for, what it is he cannot have.

There will be a gun in his hand, and Medina will be screaming, and the car will roar with fury as it tears out of Cusco, and Eames will be looking at him with astonishment, and then the rain will flatten everything to the stony squash of Noah’s downfall, and he will think,

_A free conscience. That is what I cannot have._

.

.

(But then Eames’ hand will rest tenderly on his neck in palliative comfort and he will think, just maybe, he is allowed something else in return.)

.

.

“Who was the arsehole with the badge, and why did he call me Tessaro?” Eames asks with sullen dismay the moment Arthur slips inside his hospital room.

Arthur winces, closing the door behind him with a snick and lowering himself into the chair with extreme caution. Eames is awake, more awake than he was yesterday and sitting up this time.

There are no more charcoal stains inside his mouth, and the red rims of his eyes have softened.

There’s an IV line in the crook of his elbow, a tag on his wrist and that look in his eyes, the one that says  _What’s the plan, darling?_

“An obstacle,” Arthur says. “I’m fixing it.”

“You’d better,” Eames stubbornly, to which Arthur lets out a feeble chuckle.

“Excuse me? This is  _your_ doing, Eames. If you hadn’t -”

Eames smiles a very dark, daring smile as Arthur clams up. He raises his eyebrows slightly, and his entire face seems to transform into something much more powerful than anything he was capable of three days ago.

“Well,” he says. “If you’d just let me -”

“Don’t you fucking dare finish that sentence, Eames,” Arthur says, feels the steel in his breath.

The moment crystallises. It holds like an overexposed photograph in Arthur’s mind, will be a point of futureless return, a pastless reflection of watery glass when all the colour washes out of his memories.

Eames, desperate to wield his last remaining weapon, gritting his teeth under Arthur’s icicle dare.

He breathes short little breaths, runs his free hand over the bandages of his fingers.

“Can we just, table this argument? For another time?” Arthur asks quietly.

Eames licks his chapped lips, glancing around the room as if hoping to find some other Point Man to support him.

“Yes,” he says with a tiny grin. “That sounds incredibly healthy.”

Arthur snorts, a smile breaking through his wobbly facade of control, which has, quite honestly, never felt more like a facade than in this very moment.

He reaches forwards, and despite the smallest of flinches, Eames’ hand stays still as Arthur’s fingers lace carefully over his own.

“I -” Arthur says, but it catches like a razor in his throat.

The words won’t come, even though he knows they would be true.

He knows it now the same way he knew it on that boat out of Ancona, and in the warehouse in Paris, when all he could think to say was  _You sent me away._

So instead he leans carefully towards Eames, until the flutter of his eyelashes is loud and the soap smell of his skin is so welcome compared to what it had been the last time Arthur was this close to him.

He expects Eames to pull away, if only instinctually. He doesn’t though. He simply watches, as if waiting to see what Arthur will do.

Arthur knows what he wants to do, what he’s wanted to do for an age. He knows Eames is thinking it, too. Maybe even assumes Arthur will do it, with or without permission.

It stings a little but isn’t an entirely unfair assumption.

(Arthur's self-control has been a little off, lately.)

“When we get out of here, we’re going to go somewhere very hot. We’re going to drink lemonade and swim in the sea and play backgammon.”

“I hate backgammon,” Eames retorts.

“I hate poker,” Arthur grins. “And I realised something important.”

Eames tilts his head in question. His cheeks are hollow, the skin of his eyes bruised dry.

“What’s that?” he asks with false coyness.

For some reason, this feels more important than the other conversation, the one they should probably be having instead. Of course, Arthur knows he’s being significantly more self-involved than he should be right now, and he knows that Eames will more than likely forgive him for it.

He smiles his most solicitous smile and says,

“You didn’t sell me out to Yslovski for a quarter of a million euros.”

That’s when the most astounding thing happens.

Eames looks  _surprised._ A startled laugh, and his hand squeezes Arthur’s as firmly as he can through the finger splints.

“No,” he says. A deeper smile, the realest yet. “Of course I didn’t, you distrustful cretin.”

.

.

Three years ago, a glittering day in May.

Eames sits tied to a desk chair, feeling very foolish and a little anxious.

“This isn’t necessary, you know,” he says. “I’d have come along quite willingly.”

A split inside his lip that he tongues every few minutes. His fingers are numb and he may or may not be in a dream.

(He’s probably not in a dream.)

There’s an angry Russian, two thugs who are thorning his side, and Eames is not entirely sure who told Yslovski that Arthur was the godson of a Mafia gun hand but it was probably Bolshevik Bloody Brendan, the lousy gossip that he is.

“I’ll make you a deal,” he says. “But the American must live.”

.

.

Arthur pries the licence plates off the car less than an hour before departure time. He’s drunk several pints of coffee, packed a rucksack of non-perishables and called ahead to Hong Kong to make sure nobody will be waiting to arrest them when they touch down at the airport.

He knows Eames is pissed at him for using the Tessaro name, but it’s the only one he knows will survive customs intact at such short notice. As long as nobody ships them to Arkansas, they should be fine.

(Rather, as long as they just stay clear of the United States altogether, they’ll be fine. Why the hell does Eames have to turn into such a kleptomaniac every time he gets within a hundred miles of a new art gallery?)

There’s that fever burn of adrenaline, thin lines of copper in his limbs.

Time fights him hard. The clocks scurry onwards and the sun battles through the thin streaks of the clouds. Arthur’s running out of cash flow without access to his US accounts and he has no way of contacting Eames to forewarn him of their new departure time.

Behind the wheel of the car he blasts the horn and drives just shy of too fast to get pulled over and he reaches the hospital in twenty minutes. Backdoor friendly, the swing and sling of the business of death.

Sweat soaks his shirt. In the backseat, a change of clothes for Eames and two more guns that’ll be too hot to carry any further than Lima.

(He tries very hard not to think about the long drive ahead, how slowly that trail to Manchester from London had been, even though it was only a couple of hundred miles of clean road.)

.

.

_American, this is Detective Medina._

How did you get this number?

_It’s strange, Mr Penzak. I’ve been looking for your visa history and I can’t seem to find anything._

Oh, really?

_Yes. Very strange. It’s almost as if you don’t exist._

.

.

There is, of course, one advantage to Medina’s youth.

It’s the prideful kind, the kind that makes him sly and secretive and too good for backup until it’s too late.

.

.

(It's the youth that merits inexperience, that means he probably won't appreciate the lengths Arthur will be willing to go to.)

.

.

(It's the youth of not being in love yet, to understand how desperate it can make a man.)

.

.

Arthur pulls up a short distance from the back entrance to the hospital, a gun in his hand and his heart in his mouth.

A quick stop in a laundry room to pull on some staff scrubs, thin and too big. Nowhere to hide his damn gun, of course, so he stashes it amidst towelling and takes a fresh batch up to the in-patient wards.

He’s stopped three times by nurses and doctors and visitors, making sharp Spanish demands that he barely replies to. Lots of nodding and gesticulating with one hand - Eames would torment him mercilessly, he thinks.

When he gets there Eames is asleep, of course, because why wouldn’t he be?

Arthur would like to do this kindly, but there is rarely kindness in the act of saving a person’s life. He shakes Eames hard, and his hand has only just gripped Eames’ shoulder before Eames surges awake, shooter sharp. He grips Arthur’s wrist tight, the trace of a snarl.

“What the hell -” he starts, but Arthur’s already pulling him upright.

“Time to go. Hurry.”

“You said -”

“I know what I said,” Arthur snaps. “Medina’s cleverer than I thought. Get these on.”

He tosses jeans and a polo shirt and a pair of blue trainers on the foot of Eames’ bed, along with an oversized hooded sweater. Leaves him to it while Arthur pokes his head out of the door. Nobody yet.

“I left him a train trail to Puno that I think he’ll bite on. If we don’t leave now, though, there’s a chance he’ll tag our passports before we get out of Lima.”

“Oh, because that’s not a bloody obvious choice,” he hears Eames mutter to himself.

Arthur doesn’t respond.

He snaps his fingers in a  _hurry_ motion and Eames hisses,

“Don’t  _click_ at me, Arthur, it’s the height of rudeness.”

Arthur would laugh, if breathing wasn’t such a chore. He turns back just in time to see Eames pulling his shirt down over the stripes of his ribs with some difficulty, owing to the bulk of his bandaged hand.

He slips his trainers on shuffling feet and moves to standing with only a slight sway.

He’s magnificent, and he looks like he’s about to keel over already as he pulls the hood of his sweater up.

“You can sleep in the car,” Arthur promises him with a tight smile.

“Yes, I bloody well can,” Eames grumbles, taking the second gun Arthur hands him despite the weak shake in his fingers. “I’ll follow.”

The words jab Arthur, warm and deep, like worrisome fingers in an old scar. He nearly smiles.

They exit together, Arthur hidden behind his pile of towels and Eames strolling a few metres behind in that surprisingly inconspicuous way of his, the one that allows even Arthur’s attentive eyes to skim past him when Eames wants.

.

.

The hospital is too busy to pay them much heed.

.

.

That is, until they reach the exit.

.

.

“You Americans and your guns,” Medina says for a second time.

He’s wearing that cocky grin, actually swinging his badge like a prize. Those aviators on his head reflecting the tepid sunshine as the clouds gather into a wild storm.

.

.

Arthur doesn’t hesitate, cocked and ready.

He raises his hand and fires three times.

.

.

The first bullet hits the detective’s shoulder.

The second crunches straight through his core.

The third streaks through his face like the slashing of a sword.

.

.

_(There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are.)_

.

.

On a Wednesday in June, Arthur receives a call from his shrieking sister. A great wail of noise that blares out of his phone in surges of agony.

She sounds like she’s being murdered, and all at once Arthur feels the weighty responsibility of being an older sibling as he hasn’t done in years.

 _“She’s coming!”_ his sister screams and Arthur’s first response is,  _Oh God, that’s it, she’s finally cracked._

He flies post-haste to New Jersey in search of the right hospital, but when he gets there she isn’t in a psych ward.

It’s a maternity ward.

“Isn’t she beautiful, Danny?” Arthur’s sister asks him, hollow and swollen and full to the brim with miracles as she gazes adoringly at the pink bundle in her arms.

She’s a woman now, not a girl, he realises.

She’s a mom.

Arthur kisses his baby sister’s cheek proudly, says to her,  _I’ll fetch a nurse,_ and leaves mother and daughter to their nestling.

He does in fact fetch a nurse, but he doesn’t return to the room with her.

Instead he walks out of the front door of the hospital, anxious to be on the move before -

Too late.

His father is there, haughty and assumptive as he stalks up the walkway to his firstborn.

“Where have you been?” he demands.

Arthur’s fingers twitch reflexively inside his jacket pocket.

“I didn’t even know she was pregnant,” he replies, which he thinks is probably not a good excuse at all.

His father doesn’t seem to think so either, because he scoffs with that precise derision that Arthur, one day, will perfect for himself.

“She wouldn’t get rid of it,” he snarls, not at all the proud grandfather that maybe he could have been, if there’d been a grandmother by his side to help him.

Arthur laughs unkindly.

“She’s nineteen,” he shrugs, as if that is a measure of anything whatsoever.

Then he leaves.

.

.

(It is the last time he will ever speak to his father, though he doesn’t know it yet.)

.

.

He won’t see his sister for three years.

When he does, it will be after she calls to say  _Happy birthday, Uncle Dee,_ and he’ll end up on a plane to Michigan to visit her new house, because the guilt has grown talons and is shredding his insides, clawing its way up his throat like a demon from within.

.

.

Arthur leaves people behind. He’s done it all his life.

He thinks, maybe, it’s unfair of Eames to expect to be treated any differently.

He thinks about his mother’s grave, which he hasn’t visited since her funeral.

.

.

Arthur also thinks, if he could go into a PASIV and systematically delete all these memories of suffering from his mind, as easily as shooting projections, he would do it.

(Of course he would.)

.

.

In the car, Arthur drives shakily through coarse, watchful Cusco.

It’s nothing new, but he thinks about his mom, that scream of hers he made up in his nightmares. He looks at Eames, the astonishment in his eyes and lemons in his throat.

“Put your seatbelt on,” Arthur says.

Eames does so, silently, and only then does Arthur realise he’d actually shouted it.

Shouted it very loudly, in fact.

“Arthur, slow down,” Eames says breathlessly as they hurtle along an empty backstreet.

There are no sirens, not yet at least. Nonetheless, Medina’s screech of agony as he hit the ground is still ringing in Arthur’s ears.

Eames is holding his gun with his left hand, because his right is still cut up. It reminds Arthur of the first time he realised Eames was ambidextrous, how he’d laughed and said  _of course_ and kissed both palms, each loving fingertip.

Now, Arthur swallows the glass in his throat as they jerk unsteadily to a crawl, down a slim red brick alley that might just be a dead end.

“Arthur-”

“Don’t,” Arthur whispers. His knuckles sharp as he grips the steering wheel too tight. “We need to get out of here.”

A hand on the back of his neck. Bandages and bones.

“Then let’s go,” Eames says, in a voice that is both tender and urgent.

Arthur glances in the rear view, sees only pavement and an overfilled skip dirtied along the edges. A long stripe of what looks like a cat’s tail peeking out from behind it.

And beside him, Eames. That crumpled wariness, his cliff edge expression and the weight of his hand on Arthur’s spine.

“You’ve never kidnapped anyone before, have you?” he asks, seems to be going for sly but coming up solemn.

Arthur purses his lips, shakes his head.

“How did I do?” he asks with a shaky grin.

In return, Eames offers him a sorrowful smile. It’s apologetic for all the wrong reasons, invites irritation but Arthur’s out of everything except shock right now.

“I’ll let you know once we’re on the plane, darling.”

The gear sticks briefly mid-change.

Arthur curses. A crack of sound, like his father’s palm over his little sister’s tears.

And then they’re gone.

.

.

 _So, it’s true,_ Arthur said in Monaco, when Eames had a gun to his temple. He can’t remember what he meant by that anymore. It’s a tumble of relief and rejection, the entire memory.

He wonders how Eames remembers it, if remembers any of it in the crystal clarity that Arthur does the moment right after Eames punched him in the mouth. The silence of it, the surprise.

He should have realised, then. He should have seen the horror in the upturn of Eames’ mouth and known, beyond any doubt, there is no way Eames could possibly have sold him out to a trigger-happy mobster.

.

.

The rain, when it comes, is tumultuous.

The windscreen wipers are no match for the downpour. The city is swamped with sheets of splashing grey.

The car’s interior smells of bullets and rage; outside, the sidewalks swim.

They leave Cusco via main rains unchallenged, and Arthur would think it was divine intervention if he believed in that sort of thing, only he doesn’t.

All he thinks is how the rain is undoubtedly powerful enough to wash Medina’s blood off the concrete, enough to paint the sewers red.

The rural roads of South America gobble them up in rain and wrath. Eames, hazy with fatigue, sleeps slack in the passenger seat, one hand on his gun.

Arthur drives through the tattoo troubling of the rain, the engine growl deep, like a jaguar in disguise.

.

.

“I just want to ask you a few questions,” Medina says, the first time.

He’s so young, so fresh. Even his stern face is too eager. He carries himself with pride, the bruised peach kind.

 _I was a man like you,_ Gabriel said to Arthur.

Now Arthur looks at this kid playing policeman with his shiny badge and thinks,  _I was a boy like you._

.

.

Eames wakes up as they scrape the halfway milestone, which is lucky because Arthur’s vision is starting to blur.

He rouses with suddenness, like nausea offshore. One moment peaceful, the next, alert.

“Good evening,” Arthur greets him with lazy caution.

The rain has eased a little, but it hasn’t stopped completely yet. Eames blinks, dozy eyed as he cracks his jaw unpleasantly.

His hood is up, his face poking out of it like a bewildered owl until he pulls it down to reveal a dark gold flurry of cowlicks. His cheeks are flushed and he’s trembling, but that’s hardly unexpected.

He’s eaten what probably amounts to two full meals since  _not dying_ four days ago.

“Where are we?” he asks hoarsely, staring out of the windscreen and clearing his throat loudly.

“Darkest Peru,” Arthur says, just to see his mouth twitch. “You missed a whole pack of jaguars. They send their regards.”

Eames makes a movement with his eyes that has an inkling of an eye roll.

“Arse,” he says, then, “Time to swap?”

Arthur shakes his head, partly as a no and mostly to try shake off his exhaustion.

“Arthur-”

“You’d crash in the first half hour.”

“Well you’re about to crash any second,” Eames points out, not without reason.

Arthur blinks furiously against the drag of sleep.

The car’s speed has dropped along with Arthur’s ever decreasing confidence in his ability to stay awake. At this rate, they won’t reach Lima until next week.

(If there isn’t already an armed guard waiting for them at the capital’s outskirts, that is.)

“Hmph,” he grunts, crawling the car into the side of the road, where beyond them is a vast glade of wet green.

If he thinks about it too much, Arthur is certain he could be very frightened of this dense wilderness, where he does not belong.

“That’s a lad,” Eames encourages, shuffling out into the rain to swap seats.

Even the brief scurry from door to door leaves their hair plastered to their heads, their sweaters soaked at the shoulders.

Eames shakes himself like a bedraggled terrier, pulling with bravado into fourth gear even as Arthur clicks his seatbelt on.

The hum of the car feels different from this angle. He can understand how Eames slept for so long.

Rather than close his eyes, though, Arthur reaches into the backseat and grabs a rucksack to rummage through. Carefully, he unpeels the lid of a can of syrupy peach pieces, wafting the scent of sugar through the damp car.

Eames opens his mouth like a baby bird, complete with a hungry sound. Arthur holds a sticky peach slice up with his fingers for him to bite in half.

Eames makes a grunting sound of gratitude as Arthur shoves the rest into his own mouth, the sweetness soaking his tongue as he groans appreciatively.

They share slice after slice in heady, cohesive silence.

Eames drives with surprising confidence despite the villainous weather and inexcusably shaky terrain.

Once the can is almost empty, Arthur slows down their scoffing.

“The additives in this are going to wreak havoc on your stomach,” he warns.

Eames makes a disgruntled, vowelless sound.

“Additives? It’s fruit and sugar, Arthur,” he grumbles indignantly. “I’m not that much of a weakling.”

In spite of the lightness colouring Eames’ voice, Arthur feels a hot streak of frustration for the man’s pig-headedness. A frustration that blurts out of him with harsh indictment,

“You just tried to kill yourself, Eames.”

The fact of it, in all its indisputable glory, momentarily renders them both stupid.

Eames narrows his eyes, peering resolutely through the rainy windscreen.

Arthur stares at him with shameless accusation, until the loudness of the rain is unbearable.

“I thought we were tabling this until further notice?” Eames finally asks.

“This  _is_ further notice.”

Eames laughs a little too coldly.

“Are we doing this now because it’s the right time, or because you don’t want to talk about how you just shot a man in the face?”

Arthur recoils instantly, staring down at the gloopy peach remnants in the slick mouth of the tin. He bites his teeth together until the grinding pain overwhelms his desire to start sniffling.

Eames, meanwhile, sighs to himself.

“That was unfair of me,” he admits with squirming discomfort.

Arthur moves his shoulders in a dismissive twitch,

“I was unfair, too,” he replies meekly, still inspecting the can with deep scrutiny.

Eames snorts, badger’s revenge.

“Yes,” he says shortly. “You were.”

Arthur should say something more, something else, but what comes out instead is,

“He didn’t even have his gun out.”

Another sigh, quieter still.

The gentle gathering of the weary’s resources.

Arthur already knows everything that Eames has to say and everything he doesn’t want to hear; that he doesn’t care that Medina was practically unarmed, that he was naive, a kid, that he’s probably dead or a vegetable, that Arthur’s not sure which fate Medina would consider to be worse.

“He knew what he was getting into,” Eames says with cutting dismissal.

“I could have just  _kneecapped_ him, Eames,” Arthur says, a quiver shy of a shout.

Eames is visibly aggravated by Arthur’s conscience.

The car speeds a swerving hairpin bend. Arthur’s stomach swoops.

“There’s a chance he hasn’t filed anything under our names yet, Arthur,” Eames says in a disgustingly level-headed tone.

How can a man who paints in such pastel shades of beauty be so indifferent to this violence they inhabit?

“He didn’t deserve that,” Arthur says uselessly.

“Probably not,” Eames agrees. “But it’s what he got. Christ, Arthur, you’re so fucking soft sometimes.”

Arthur’s not entirely sure Eames has ever sounded so disappointed in him.

It stings horribly, like the wail of his little sister’s agony down a crackling phone line.

“Have you always been this cruel?” he asks.

Eames barks a laughless sound. He’s hollow and sweating and his foot twitches on the pedal, so that they jerk forwards in their seats.

“Yes,” he replies. “Have you always been this self-pitying?”

That hurts, too.

It’s more reasonable, at least. Arthur  _has_ been self-pitying, particularly since the Fischer Job.

He roots through the goo in the can and extracts another peach slice.

“No, that’s pretty new,” he admits, holding up the slice for Eames to bite.

Eames leans further forward, takes in so much of the slice his teeth graze Arthur’s fingertips, sending a shiver of surprise up his arm.

At his low breath, Eames spares a flicker of a glance at Arthur.

A fleeting scatter of attention, a worried kind, a good kind. The glint of starlings in flight.

Those eyes, very big, very blue.

“I didn’t mean to do it,” he says, a gravelled tone of anger in the confession.

Arthur blinks.

It’s a truthful voice and after everything, it seems unlikely Eames would actually lie to him now.

Still, it’s not entirely honest. After all, Eames might not have meant to go so far, but he didn’t  _accidentally_ buy several bags of barbiturates and proceed to conceal them from Arthur’s knowledge.

“Are you sure?”

“Not really.”

Arthur nods, rolls his neck in a series of click that trill like the raindrops on the windows.

“Are you going to do it again?”

Eames licks his lips. For the briefest of moments, Arthur sees them stained black again, jet against a bloodless face.

The answer comes forth reluctantly. It crawls out of Eames in elongated vowels and staccato consonants.

“I don’t think so.”

At first that seems to be all he has to say. Then, that jutting lip in a smile as cocked as Arthur’s firearm.

“Are we going to talk about having sex with other people again?”

It’s not quite a threat, drags close enough towards teasing territory for Arthur to cough a sound akin to laughter.

“Probably not. We can just talk about having sex with each other, when you want to.”

He tries not to sound too  _therapist_ about it, but he thinks he fails.

Eames offers him a disdainful sidelong glance, his grip shifting on the steering wheel. He looks thin in these clothes, looks narrow boned.

There’s something birdlike about his keen alertness; the ruffled feather tufts of his hair and the jerking movements of his hand on the gearstick. Someone must have shaved him in the hospital, because there’s only a fine layer of scruff on his jaw

“Arthur,” he murmurs, wearing his amused face. It doesn’t sit right over his blatant apprehension. “I don’t think I’m going to be very good at it anymore.”

A pause of quiet, timorous embarrassment.

Without meaning to, Arthur laughs.

“I’ve been told I’m rather like a bike, in that respect,” Arthur assures him.

Eames snorts, an insecure treble of a sound.

“A lot of legwork and a sore arse after a while?”

Arthur laughs again, a little more confidently, offering Eames a very real smile this time.

Around them, watery scenery slides past. There’s a map in the footwell somewhere that Arthur should probably look for. Not that they’ve seen a turnoff for miles, anyway.

They’re on a steady incline of road, now, the sky tilted ironclad and scowling.

Another of those glances, ocean currents and salt mines.

“Eames,” Arthur says, before the man can make another feeble joke. “You know it’s not about the sex.”

He says it candidly, as unquestioningly as he can manage.

A smile graces Eames’ wan expression, bending awkwardly into guilt and relief and something even more vulnerable still.

“I knew you liked my pillow talk, really,” he mutters.

That bullet rage fog is clearing. Arthur breathes a long sigh that is too vast to conceal, leans his head back against the headrest of the seat. He’s jittery from the tethered ends of the coffee he drank before leaving. Eames’ peacefulness a balm.

Then, with a breezy sense of decisiveness, “Let’s go to California.”

Arthur blinks, eyebrows raised in surprise.

“Are you sure?”

Eames shrugs, makes a gesture at the peach can in Arthur’s clammy hands and waggles his fingers nonsensically.

“If we go to - I don’t know. Malta or Hanoi or somewhere, I’ll be -  _me._ And I don’t think I trust me right now.”

Arthur reaches for Eames’ leg, then thinks better of it.

He fishes another peach slice out of the tin instead, is prepared this time for Eames’ mouth closing over his finger and thumb as he bites. The syrup slips down Arthur’s wrist in viscous trickles.

“We can’t go to California with your Tessaro passport,” he reminds Eames.

Eames, snaking out his tongue just barely enough to catch Arthur’s hand as retreats with the smaller half of the peach,  _hmphs_ with divinely familiar joy.

“I know a guy,” he says, blasé and brilliant.

Arthur grins, and it feels like sunshine.

“Of course you do,” he says.

.

.

(He will see the red splash of Medina’s shriek in every dream for months. It will stain him, a burn scar inflamed, like the knotted cut on Eames’ throat that Arthur can’t touch without cringing.)

.

.

(He will go back, one day. Not yet, though. Not until he’s alone in a peaceless world, with a bullet carved to kill and a hit list of one to exact his blinding vengeance.)

.

.

 _I’m sorry,_ Eames will say, the first time they try.

The second, the third, the third and a half.

.

.

 _It’s like you’ve done this before_ , she will say, in the years to come, tucked into a hotel bed and sweating her tears with bruises on her mouth and Arthur, full of anguish and stormy regret, he will say,  _Last time I was too late._

.

.

Before that, though. Before a job in Lithuania that should have been routine and was in fact, not. Before everything else, there is this.

.

.

California embraces them, linen shirts and board shorts.

Eames drinks Jameson’s watered down with lemonade, and Arthur does, too.

They play draughts, which they hate equally, and they swim in the Pacific until their skin shrivels.

.

.

Three months later, Ariadne Warren will open her door in Paris, take one look at Arthur and say,  _You’ve got a tan._

 _It’s hot in California,_  Arthur will reply, and Ariadne will look oddly scandalised at this revelation.

Eames will text him photos of his new Constable forgery every day and Arthur will miss him ferociously, as he’s never allowed himself to before.

.

.

(There was that time.)

.

.

“How did you get out of Russia?” Arthur asks in the lilac of evening, as they starfish in the Californian sand, bronze and blue. “How did you get to Monaco?”

Eames reaches up to place a hand on Arthur’s head, rubbing the white crust of the sea into his scraggly hair.

“I was owed a favour by a woman.”

Arthur turns his cheek to the sand, takes in Eames’ sandy profile. Fuller, heavier, harder.

They aren’t  _there_ yet, but they’re better, both of them.

There’s a lot of hands closing distances these days. Their skins are fingerprinted with each other’s salt.

“What did you do for Yslovski, to get him off my back?”

Eames’s jaw works around his lies first, swallowing each one in turn as the sun paints amber into their bare chests. He turns, too, and in the navy shadows of the approaching dusk, their eyes find each other.

“Nothing I haven’t done before,” he says, leaving room for almost anything.

While the burning desire to know remains, Arthur rather thinks he doesn’t deserve to know. Or at least, he hasn’t earned it yet.

Whatever Yslovski wanted, it was enough that Eames felt it was better for Arthur to think he sold him out than to know the truth.

“And you still gave me the money,” Arthur chuckles.

Eames’ solemnity splits into a pleased look.

“Of course I did,” he says. “I had to get you to São Paulo somehow.”

“I’d have come anyway,” Arthur says and only thinks afterwards that might be an embarrassing thing to admit.

Eames, however, chuckles throatily.

“It’s sweet that you think that,” he grins.

Arthur wants to insist, but as usual Eames is probably right. Arthur can read lies as easily as road signs on most people, on everyone but his own hostile reflection. Eames sometimes tricks him, but it’s only Arthur who consistently blinds himself to his own wants.

And Eames, he forgives Arthur these blinkers, and Arthur knows that.

.

.

(When the time comes, when the thunder is deafening and the stench of gasoline stings his eyes, this will be the root of his survival.)

.

.

 _I don’t need you, you know,_ Eames will say, and Arthur will feel it acutely.

And then, in that same droll matter-of-factness, as if it is such a chore to confess, Eames will say,

_I want you. I adore you._

.

.

There was that time, a lifetime of dreams ago.

It’s gone, now.

.

.

_(a struggle for a shorter day when the night comes in shifts, dusk to dawn, dawn to dusk, stars stitched -)_

_._

_._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis
> 
> I should tell I blew the candle out, just to get back in. ~ Jonathan Larson, Rent (I Should Tell You)
> 
> But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same? ~ Anthony Doerr, All The Light We Cannot See
> 
> There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. ~ Pablo Neruda
> 
> a struggle for a shorter day when the night comes in shifts, dusk to dawn, dawn to dusk, stars stitched - ~ Jackie Kay, Thinker

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from: ...you have that rare sort of charm that usually only happens in very old or hopelessly sick people, the charm of the defeated. ~ Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
> 
> He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors. ~ Rudyard Kipling, Many Inventions
> 
> Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone. ~ J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
> 
> Are you running late? Did you sleep too much? All the awful dreams felt real enough. ~ Dark Rooms, I Get Overwhelmed
> 
> Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again. ~ Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient


End file.
